Quik Finally Running

I finnaly figured out why Quik wasn't working on my powermac 4400 - the IDE drive was set to master, changing it to single worked.

When I first installed the hard drive I noticed MacOS couldn't see it at all- I had put it down to limitations in Apple's Drive Setup (as it's not an Apple drive) seeing as Linux would see it and install. Even though I could get Linux installed on it Quik never worked, so I had to boot off an external SCSI drive with BOOTX.

I started playing around with Quik and OpenFirmware and I noticed that OF couldn't see the drive either (it never appeared in OF's dev / ls command). Googleing around found indications that MacOS (at least when running on a 4400) is a bit odd about how it handles IDE, so I decided to pop the case off and have a play with drive's jumpers. Setting it to single worked - it popped up in OF and after booting one more time via BOOTX so I could run a dpkg-reconfigure quik it started working.

Circular Knoppix

In order to get Knoppix running on an old machine that won't boot from a CD, you need to use boot floppies. In order to make boot floppies with the current version of Knoppix you need to boot into Knoppix and run the makefloppies script.

The terms Chicken and Egg come to mind.

Why is distutils seperate from python on debian

distutils is part of the core of python, but the debian people have decided to make life harder for their users and have split it off from the main python package and into python-dev. Why? Besides being part of the core, distutils is used by non developers to install python software. It should not be in a seperate package.