Well... my main question is: how to install without X. I believe it's rather simple to get X working with some available disk space.
Booting WattOS into a machine that may be able to start the GUI and transplanting the flash disk may be an option, but I don't consider it good sportmanship
And no CDROM is nowadays not what I call difficult machine specs, rather it's very common to not have any optical drive (eg. any netbook)
in any case, here come the specs of the target HW:
IGEL M310C thin client
Processor VIA Nano U3500 1GHz
Chipsets VIA VX855 (embedded graphics)
Memory DDR2 533-800 SO-DIMM 1GB
Audio VIA VT1708S HD
Network 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet
5 x USB 2.0 Storage
1*44 pins IDE port / One 1*50 pins CF port
I measured a max of 16W power consumption during bootup. I got it for 5 Euros on ebay and plan to run a flightradar24 feed with it.
The CPU itself seems to be ok, the OS boots up perfectly.
I found out that the X.log above shows the wrong part. Earlier it says that /dev/dri/card0 is not found, which implies the drivers for the graphics aren't loaded.
The VX855 chipset with embedded graphics seems to require some drivers in order to run X, they're avaiable as OpenSource and from manufacturer (VIA). If you look at the acccording Ubuntu help pages you see that you need a development environment in order build either of them properly, but on the live ramdisk is not enough space. I remounted the USB disk of which I booted the system as read/write and moved/linked /var/lib and /var/cache onto the disk to free up some space on the ram disk. Next step is to try the proprietary drivers.
thanks!