>So are you saying there is additional hardware that has to be 
>enabled before the 16550 can blink the leds?

Yeah, you have to twiddle extra registers on the Super-IO controller.
I think the default is to send the bits out of the regular serial pins,
which on the Shark aren't connected to anything.  Check out the Super-IO
datasheet for more info (it's 200 pages, though :-/).

I'll try doing that tonight and see what happens.

--Ken