waddles.org Wad about me?

I'm still seeking a new distro that takes less work than Gentoo but sits on the cutting edge and has reasonable package management. Kubuntu is potentially my next favourite distro and I'm currently running 9.04. I hate KDE4 but that's another story. Long live KDE3!

Unfortunately, the work we did in resolving the scanning problems for the Canon MP730 (pixma driver) didn't make it into SANE before 1.0.20 was released so probably even Ubuntu Karmic won't have MP730 support until SANE tags a new release. This leaves me with a problem: How do I rebuild the SANE packages to get my scanner supported?

My attempts to install KDE3 onto Ubuntu Jaunty were recently thwarted when Tim Pearson's KDE3 apt repository was taken out by a nearby lightning strike. By googling, I managed to find a couple of mirrors of his livecd .iso images and was able to download what I needed, but when I booted the livecd, I found it didn't have .deb packages as I was expecting. The installer must copy the packages directly off the live image.