OK…this is another one of those things that I’m posting in case anyone else is trying to do this, and can’t find information on how to do so. After extensive Googling, it appears there was one German guy looking for an answer to this, but never received one.

What I was trying to do was install IPcop via PXE onto a SATA hard drive in a Soekris 5501, which is a PC in a very small form-factor. It is designed to act like a network device. Some of the things you expect in a PC are, however, not present. Like a video adapter.

The IPcop PXE install was a no-go, because there seemed to be no way to redirect the output of the install screens to the serial port (which is how you work with the system until you get networking going).

What I ended up doing was to plug in the hard drive in another machine. I installed IPcop, changed the network device type to via-rhine in /var/ipcop/ethernet/settings, changed the /dev/harddisk* links to point to /dev/hdb (which is where the hard drive shows up in one of these devices), and modified /boot/grub/grub.conf by commenting out the fancy stuff (colors, pixmap), adding terminal serial near the top, changing /dev/sda4 to /dev/hdb4 and adding console=ttyS0,57600 to each append line. Then, I just did grub-install --recheck /dev/hdb.

You should comment out the mingetty lines in /etc/inittab and add one like this:

S0:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 57600 ttyS0

if you want to have a login prompt on you serial console. This requires an agetty addon package. You can get it here: http://www.ipadd.de/binary.html.

That should be enough to get you up and running. After that, if you feel like it, you can clean up some of the scripts in /etc/rc.d to remove stuff that doesn’t work on the Soekris, like doing anything with /dev/tty1, /dev/tty2, etc., or outputting tones to the non-existent speaker.