In message <6.2.3.4.2.20051104041334.0a832b80@127.0.0.1>, Terry Moore writes:
>Background: we have a failing machine, that needs to be swapped out 
>right away.  We went to BestBuy and purchased the lowest-end machine 
>in stock (a strategy that has always worked very well for us in the 
>10 years we've been using NetBSD):  Amd Athlon64 3300+ (2.2GHz), 
>512MB DDR, 512KB L2.
>
>For various reasons, we want to run an i386 kernel on this 
>box.  However, both 1.6.1 and 2.1 install kernels fail with:
>
>"kbc: cmd word write error"
>
>and later
>
>"no /dev/console"
>
>and when menu comes up to choose what to install, etc., keyboard is 
>no-op and we're dead.
>
>It boots the supplied WinXP from HD fine and keyboard works fine.  We 
>therefore do not suspect the hardware is busted.
>
>We don't have a dmesg output -- can't write that fast, and there's no 
>great way to get the output to a file without a keyboard.
>

Can you set up a serial console on it, running to another machine?

		--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb