Off The Shelf

An off-the-shelf single board computer that I use frequently, is preinstalled with Linux 2.4 and Debian sarge. Yes, that's quite old, but it is actually a good thing since a new board is drop in replacement. Well, it's a good thing unless you are trying to do strange stuff, like I usually do.

The Python 2.3 was the default on Debian sarge. Sadly, modern tools like distribute and virtualenv do not work well with such an ancient version of Python, even though I can't find anything that says 2.3 is not supported. I'm having enough trouble that I've given up on using 2.3.

Fortunately, the Debian sarge archive is still around so I'm going to install Python 2.4 to see if that helps. The main drawback is I'll lose the drop in replacement factor, but I need to get this working.