Once I swapped the internal drives on the ‘book, I was able to mount the appropriate volume to my main box via SCSI dock mode.

After a couple further abortive installation attempts, was eventually able to install Jaguar to the appropriate volume, and the G4 tower was able to boot from the drive.

Naturally, the ‘book, undocked, was not able to boot from the drive. This may be because I have to swap the drives back, or it could, possibly, be because Jaguar has introduced some machine-specific code for the first time in the OS X release cycle. This is unlikely, however: there are reports of a poorly-documented required firmware update for slot-loading iMacs, but the Wallstreet ‘books are explicitly not affected by this problem.

Lordy, this ain’t like the Macs that brought me here. It’s painfully time consuming and trial-and-error – in fact, these are the issues that kept me away from Unix for so very, very long: I don’t find this process of endless experimentation, predicated on a detailed knowledge of hardware (thankfully, I appear to have acquired the knowledge) life-affiriming or creative or a wise, thoughtful use of my time. It’s rather a direct theft of time from my reationship with my wife, and this troubles me. Fortunately, my unhappiness about this has not yet begun to cloud my technical judgement, insofar as when I hit a dead end, I’m not experiencing either blinding headaches or rage.