[Soekris] GPS on 4511 Serial port

[Doug Moeller]

Hey all.

I've got a Soekris 4511 that I'm running a Linux Debian (Pebble) 
distribution on.  I've got a GPS plugged into the serial port that is 
working fine,  but my problem is that the system won't boot when the GPS 
is plugged in.   I imagine that it's because the Serial Port is 
receiving all the continuous GPS data at boot and it's interpreting one 
of them as a break.

So,  is there anyway to work around this? 

I'm OK with disabling the use of the serial port as a console 
alltogether,  but I've been unable to get that to work.

I've tried removing the  "append="console=ttyS0,19200n8"" line from my 
lilo.conf file and changing the ttS0 parameter to ttS1,  but neither had 
any effect.

Any ideas?

I found a solution in the archives for FreeBSD,   but it didn't apply to 
Linux/Pebble distribution.

Thanks for any help

             -Doug

P.S.  I realize that it may seem risky to get rid of the console output 
alltogether,  but this thing is going to be deployed where console 
access is impossible anyway.   However an ideal solution to my problem 
would allow me to re-enable the console and disable the GPS at will.  
(not required though.