Porting Oracle Datafiles to an x86 machine

Hi list
I have an IBM AIX 5.1 (PowerPC Power4 RISC processor) server running Oracle
8.1.7 and I want to have a test restore/recovery server for testing the
validity of all my backups and a development database. My problem is we
can't afford another server (AIX) and thus I'm considering buying an x86
(Intel or AMD Linux server { much much affordable you will agree} ) and then
port all the datafiles to that machine.
My question is will these datafiles be portable/compatible on a Redhat/Suse
linux server? or I'll have to convert  the datafiles to a certain format to
make them compatible to the linux box? Does this really work? Can I have a
test database running on a completely different platform (processor) as the
production database? 

Thank you for all the help.

Best Regards.

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