Branden's Apple Hardware
Upgrading Branden's Quadra worked quite well in the end. We've even successfully installed linux-image-2.6.12-1-mac on this machine (which is thus far unheard of—he's probably the first Debian/m68k user to be using the Debian-packaged 2.6 kernels and succeeding). It's going through a (lengthy) fsck ATM, though; it appears 2.6 and 2.2 have different ideas of time stamps. Oh well.
Now to finish what I actually wanted to accomplish here: get EMILE running. I have a little under three hours left to do that. Should be possible...
In related news, Branden's had bad luck with his iBook, which decided it didn't like to react to its power button anymore. Tried a few things to get it to work again, thus far unsuccessfully. Luckily it isn't my laptop, which is still happily working; but I feel his pain.