Well, after a few days of trying to get this to work I'm posting this from my I-Opener, running Opera in FreeBSD.
There was, of course, a little trick in getting this to work. I had previously removed the goofy splash screen from the BIOS. After doing this, the BIOS leaves the system in a graphical state (in other words, the 'tab trick' no longer works)
So, in order for FreeBSD to boot properly I either had to change the video mode with vidcontrol, which seemed a less-than-ideal solution. I've put together a better one... making some slight alterations to boot1, ala the hacked bootloader for NetBSD.
I've edited boot1 to reset the graphics mode back to text. This way, once the POST has completed and control is transfer to the bootloader, the first instructions executed reset the video mode.
The altered assembly is available here:
http://holly.colostate.edu/~bascule/boot1.s
and a precompiled binary here:
http://holly.colostate.edu/~bascule/boot1
It's not exactly elegant, but it gets the job done.
This may be installed using the disklabel utility. You can copy boot1 into /boot if you want... if so you may want to rename the existing /boot/boot1 to boot1.old or something.
If you copied the new boot1 to /boot, you'd run the following (make sure your system isn't at a securelevel or this won't work)
disklabel -B -b /boot/boot1 -s /boot/boot2 ad0
(this assuming you're using a hard drive assigned as primary master. Change ad0 accordingly depending on your situation)
