Building an serial and VGA "everything console"

Some of our recent (and some upcoming) projects are oriented to systems with serial consoles, but it's been getting pretty old dragging around old CRT terminals or tying up Mac laptops with a serial port. I'd like something that's self-contained, a little more portable and a bit less heavy. I'm sure there's any number of all-in-one setups you can buy to do this, but I'm cheap, so I'm going to DIY it. We'll start with this used, slightly abused IBM 1U console that I got for $120 (shipped) from eBay, add a terminal emulator, and put all the fixin's on. Nearly every server company produces one of these. They slide into a regular 19" rack and provide a flip-up LCD screen and keyboard in 1U. This was an IBM 7316-TF3 with a 17" screen and a combo keyboard-mouse slimline keyboard. IBM apparently manufactured these from 2004 to 2014, so it's almost on-topic for this blog, even. I chose it because it was a little banged up and the LCD had some areas of damage (probably improperly closed on…