Today I reinstalled Debian Lenny on my Dockstar. I thought it was bricked, but it isn't. I never did manage to get the CA-42 serial cable working, though, so now it has a useless tail. If I ever do brick it I guess I'll revisit the issue.
I first reinstalled Plugbox Linux, but then after installing the Dockstar kernel I discovered there was no XFS support. So then I went back to Debian. I have Lenny on some other 256MB RAM machines I own (Digital Tech Dt168 and Dt360) so I knew it would run okay with no swap. Swapping is a bad joke these days in general, and swapping to flash is an idiot move.
After installation I had to change the time zone (actually now done with dpkg-reconfigure tzdata.) If you want your root on ext3, run /usr/sbin/fw_setenv usb_rootfstype ext3 before rebooting. You also need to edit the /etc/fstab file but you can do that after the first boot so long as you unmount cleanly. Mounting ext3 as ext2 only fails to play back the journal. I hacked the script slightly to eliminate the mkfs and did it manually elsewhere, but I didn't edit the fstab until after my first boot.
ext3 should be mandatory
drink
take it from me, USE ext3!!! I've had repeated power failures and the system keeps coming up. Using ext2 previously I had problems which I had to resolve by attaching the boot volume to another machine to run fsck.