port to Droboshare (headless, NAS box)

["Peter Silva" <Peter.A.Silva@gmail.com>]

Hi folks,

never installed Debian on non-pc'ish platform.  So I have this headless NAS box.
It's ARM based.  I can build code for it using a gnu-eabi developers kit from codesourcery.com
I was thinking that instead of custom building all sorts of apps, the simple thing to do would be
to get it to kexec into a standard debian, where folks can apt-get whatever they please.
Was thinking of a netinst'ish box.  

two sorts of questions:

1) big picture... what are the steps?
     
     -- I need to put some kind of image on disk, I have 500 G's of disk space available (IT's a NAS :-)
        via USB attachment.  
        I can't really use a debootstrap, since I won't have a console... need something that comes
        up with ssh access off the bat.
     -- The stock firmware can read software from the data disk, so I can get it to run something there.
        I guess the idea is to somehow invoke kexec?
     -- There is no display/keyboard... how do I arrange for "console access" off the bat.

2) technicalia...
   
dmesg output looks like so:
Linux version 2.6.12.6-arm1 (apache@asimov.trusteddata.com) (gcc version 3.4.4 (release) (CodeSourcery ARM 2005q3-2)) #1 Fri Sep 12 16:36:22 PDT 2008
CPU: ARM926EJ-Sid(wb) [41069260] revision 0 (ARMv5TEJ)
CPU0: D VIVT write-back cache
CPU0: I cache: 32768 bytes, associativity 1, 32 byte lines, 1024 sets
CPU0: D cache: 32768 bytes, associativity 1, 32 byte lines, 1024 sets
Machine: MV-88fxx81
Using UBoot passing parameters structure
Sys Clk = 166666667, Tclk = 166666667
mvUbootVer: 0x10a080b
Memory policy: ECC disabled, Data cache writeback
On node 0 totalpages: 32768
  DMA zone: 32768 pages, LIFO batch:15
  Normal zone: 0 pages, LIFO batch:1
  HighMem zone: 0 pages, LIFO batch:1
Built 1 zonelists
Kernel command line: console=ttyS0,115200 mtdparts=phys_mapped_flash:2m(kernel),14m@2m(root_fs)root=/dev/mtdblock1 rw ip=169.254.213.234:169.254.43.200:::DB88FXX81:egiga0:none
PID hash table entries: 1024 (order: 10, 16384 bytes)
Console: colour dummy device 80x30
Dentry cache hash table entries: 32768 (order: 5, 131072 bytes)
Inode-cache hash table entries: 16384 (order: 4, 65536 bytes)
Memory: 128MB 0MB 0MB 0MB = 128MB total

so which type of ARM is this, and what bits & bobs should I be putting on my image...