Syllable on the EeePC 901

A couple of months ago I had tried to install both Syllable 0.6.5 and 0.6.6 on my EeePC 901 with a complete lack of success.
I basically gave up as there just did not seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel.
Although there seems to be at least one instance of a successful install of Syllable on a EeePC (a 701 I think), the method used has never been precisely explained.
In addition, I have never heard of anybody else except this one guy ever achieving this feat. Here's a thread where he partially explains what he did.
It seems that he installed Syllable to a complete HD without partitions whereas I always used a logical partition on the 16 GB drive of EeePC 901.
In any event, I (possibly for want of anything better to do) spent the last few days once again trying to get Syllable to work on my netbook.
First I tried to install a bootable version of Syllable 0.6.6 to my 1 GB pendrive (first formatted to FAT16) by placing the Syllable 0.6.6 install CD in the CDROM drive of my Dell 4550, plugging in the pendrive and then issuing this command from Ubuntu

sudo qemu -hda /dev/sdb1 -m 128 -cdrom /dev/scd0 -boot d

where /dev/sdb1 was the only partition on the pendrive.
The install seemed to go fine and I installed Grub to the partition first (and hen this gave a totally non-bootable usb-key), I installed it to the MBR of the pendrive. This time trying to boot to Syllable just brought me to a Grub prompt.
I even installed Grub to the MBR again with this command

# grub-install /dev/sdb

Although this seemed to go fine, still the key would not boot.

No, next I tried another variant of what I understood to be the M-Saunders method. This is what I did:
1. Create new 800 MB logical partition on 16 GB drive (/dev/sdb13)
2. Image this partition to a freshly reformatted 1 GB usb key with

sudo dd if=/dev/sdb13 of=/dev/sdc1/eeepc.img

3. Unplug the usb key and plug it into the Dell 4550. Then, with the Syllable 0.6.6 CD in the CDROM drive, install Syllable to the eeepc.img "virtual" partition using

sudo qemu -hda /dev/sdb1/eeepc.img -m 128 -cdrom /dev/scd0 -boot d

4. The install seemed to go fine but, despite quite a number of variations tried, nothing booted.

So, just more frustrations with Syllable. maybe I'll need to invest in a usb cdrom drive. On the other hand, I'm not sure Syllable is going to be very exciting even if I did manage to get it installed as no Internet connection will be available.