Hehe funny idea to but on cisco asa. :)
Actually I can think of some cases where linux does much better than vanilla cisco such as packet mangling, can integrate snort etc. All on a tiny piece of hardware designed for networking. For around $300 the 5505 is not bad. Not near as cheap as a linksys but the hardware is better, more ram, flash media, cpu.
Does booting with additional kernel options "edd=off acpi=off noacpi noapic" change anything?
I did try bot acpi=off, and noapic. I'll try the other stuff. I did manage to boot an ASA 5510 with same grml flash card. But it landed in the busybox limited command. I assume it failed to load the filesystem on the flash. I was just experimenting, the 5510 is too expensive to seriously consider for long term. I want to recompile the kernel, have the kernel load the boot option to /dev/sda1 automatically.