Installing debian on exotic HW

[Marek Šimon <marek.simon@casablanca.cz>]

Hi,
I have got a specific box - vendor is LXE, box model is MX3, procesor
should be a XSCALE PXA255 400 MHz. Vendor's system is Windows CE. I want
to install some linux to this machine. There is no CDROM, no network
booting, no floppy, only removable CF memory. So I think I must remove
it, attach to a PC, prepare the system including the bootmanager to the
CF, return the CF to the box and try to boot. I am experienced linux
user, but I never work with non PC architecture and never install linux
some other way than install CDs or debootstrap to a virtual machine.
Google leads me to many information, but there is a jungle of them -
toolchains, installation manuals for similar architectures, many ARM
subclasses, firmware updates (do I need or not?), openembeded (which
seems to be just a framework and debian maybe have some things ready),
emdebian (which seems a bit dead) and finaly, it seems nobody tried to
do it before me on this exact HW. I don't know, where to start. Could
somebody point at some good howto for cross installation to a CF?

Thanks
Marek