Hi Leon,
I have been fiddling with etherboot 5.0.10 and freebios(v1) from CVS today on a EPIA-ME6000 platform. This is the unit with a low speed clock (500MHz?) Eden C3 processor which copes with passive cooling. I think it is EPIA-M9000 alike otherwise. Using a hardware flash programmer, I first copied the VIA BIOS from the STT39SF040A (256Kbytes) into a STMicro 29F040B (512Kbytes) device. That only worked after I copied the BIOS into the upper half of the larger device (from 0x40000 to 0x7FFFF). So I recon the highest address line is not connected on the board and so the FlashROM sees high-impedance on its most significant address line (and addresses the upper half always)> I followed the HOWTO/EPIA document to the letter (without the VGA BIOS at first) booting linuxbios w/ via-rhine.elf payload. When booting, I merely got garbled output on the serial port. I have double checked that the config file reads 115200 and that my terminal reads 115200 8N1. (The 115200 is assembly hardcoded in the vt82c686 superio code -- does it cope with my different processor speed? I do not have the datasheet (yet?). After that, I have tried all speeds on the terminal without result. Is the EPIA-ME6000 (aka M6000) already reported to work here, or are you guys'n'gals refering to the M9000 and M10000 alone? How can I help?
Have you tried 57600? EPIA-M6000 seems to have problem to use 115200 under LinuxBIOS unless it is boot from normal bios and then reset the system. That's why you are getting garbage.
-Andrew