Serial troubles, IDE
Once the BIOS was flashed, I connected a nullmodem-cable
to the serial port of the terminal, plugged in the BIOS,
turned the device on and.... absolutely nothing happened.
Luckily, my first guess to the source of the problem directly
was the correct one: the serial port on the outside of the
machine was COM2, while the debugging messages were spit
out on COM1. I could modify the Linuxbios source, but I
was a tad afraid in meddling with source I had no way to debug,
so I decided to get a trusty old Siemens C35 GSM-datacable and
connect it to the COM1 pins of the SuperIO-chip:
Now, I actually had output!
After some
debugging, I ended up with a bios capable of booting from
an IDE device. While the pads for an IDE-device were available
on the mainboard, no connector was soldered onto them.
Time for a bit of do-it-yourself handywork:
I decided to mount a CF-unit there. That meant the power supply wouldn't
be loaded that much extra, and it would keep the device completely passive.
The device now booted its kernel from the CF-card, and ended up running a
stripped version of the Debian-distro.