Well, no luck yet with the automagic Minitar dev setup, though I have got the modem-relay power cycling the minitar. "echo ATH1 > /dev/tty". mmmm. It _seems_ that I get the correct serial from the AP (ie its not fried), since the lights on the eric* blink a bit, and when connected to a Decserver (at a slow baud rate, they're old and deprecated), it seems to spit things out. But it won't talk to _any_ random Linux PCs I've attached it to. I'll have to try a laptop again, perhaps it's only low voltage or something...
Tried Darwinports for OSX, it seems a lot nicer than fink. Perhaps less packages, but it is uptodate. Originally tried just using stow, but some libraries like libjpeg don't know Apple's way of doing things. Though stow is probably useful for small stuff which darwinports doesn't have.
* An eric is a crazy little serial debugging widget, with (usually) 4leds. Two are green (indicating "link" I think) and two are red ("data transfer"). There's also a switch (2p2t I think) which switches between normal and null-modem style. I can't find any online schematics, but perhaps there might be some about under a different name. I think Alwyn traced out the schematic, perhaps he might have it and I'll scan it.
Hm. The Minitar APs are kinda cool, but its a shame they have serial kinda. Since then it won't work with my iBook without a spendy dongle from keyspan or somewhere. The solution being, to put it somewhere at UCC, plugged into a machine with network, serial, and remote power reset. The easiest way for remote power? A modem of course (thanks James). Just like the UCC door. Now I just need to figure if I can just run the power straight through the phone-line into the modem, or if I need to break out the relay inside or something. If anyone noticing this knows, mail me.
With the Mintar itself, seems to be progressing well, although I neglected to notice that it was missing it's root FS (ext2). Ooops. Being able to jump to random memory locations in the bootloader is nifty though. Just set the IP (but don't ping to test, it ain't doing ICMP :), tftp an image, it ends up at 0x80500000, so you "jump 80500000". Look ma no flash! And less chance of a paperweight Minitar.
Anyway, looks like it should be able to work quite nicely as a tiny DSL router type thing for our tiny unit, so its all good. Assuming of course the wireless works. And we get DSL.