After plenty of frustration trying to upgrade my {LinkStation} box to a newer version of {Debian}, I gave up and tried {Gentoo} as per the nas-central guide, and discovered just how friendly and cuddly apt-get can be… Whilst I have used {Gentoo} from source on my {Qube}, trying to do anything with pre-built stage3 tarballs is a royal PITA when the portage EAPI has changed.
As all I wanted was a simple ARM box, I decided it was time for something less complex: Linux from Scratch, but to avoid having to pull the hard drive each time I made a boot config error, I though it would be useful to add a serial port using another nas-central guide and a Nokia 7250i DKU-5 USB data cable from eBay, for a whopping £1.49 (inc. P&P).
My cable was a five wire that required power from the box, so it was a little worrying having to solder things in place without fully testing the data transmission, but for anyone wanting wire colour confirmation:
Orange: not used
Green: +ve
White: Rx
Blue: Tx
Black: GND
It also required the insulation shaving carefully on two sides before it would fit through the Kensington lock hole, but after that and with the addition of a cable tie it fits quite neatly.
Some bodged soldering later, it was in, but refusing to work on {OS X} even though there was a /dev/ttys000 entry created as soon as the cable was plugged in. Some {Google}ing later and this page provided the driver I needed – after that it was a simple screen /dev/tty.usbserial 115200 and everything was in place.