I agree that the special edition of CodeWarrior version 4.5 available from the Freescale site, I'll call it "CW-SE", is very useful, but someone should warn you that the software that comes with the evaluation board and that you can download from the Freescale site and elsewhere on the Internet will likely leave you frustrated. I'll list some of the problems here in hopes that members of this group or at Freescale can post solutions.
The Startup_Demo will compile, assuming you use the Serial interface, but not if you use the much more powerful BDM. There is no target description for it in the project. The help file gives two ways of adding a target to a project: the easy way, which won't work in this case, and the hard way, which does. [By the way, how can I post the version that works with the Multilink BDM where others can grab it?]
Once I got the BMD version of Startup_Demo working, I tried to enable its serial debugging feature. The result always hangs in the same place, trying to put out a character. I'm sure it's a configuration issue with the board, but I haven't yet figured out what setting I have to change. I know the serial port on my PC works, because I can use it to talk to my HC08 demo board.
None of the other examples from the CD or the Internet - at least the ones that I have tried - will compile, mostly because they exceed the 32 file limit of CW-SE. Note that I have avoided examples that depend on proprietary software, so I cannot comment on them. If you are clever, and if you can figure out what files count in the 32 file limit, I'm pretty sure you can rearrange the examples to work with the CW-SE system.
More difficult to deal with are the detailed tutorial directions for Ethernet projects (provided as PDFs in AN2836SW3). The directions use Advanced Processor Expert Beans, a feature that does not come with CW-SE. I believe that there is a way around this, since I think that the routines that the Advanced Beans would generate are included in other examples. I hope that the only difference is that I'll have to hand alter various constants instead of having the Processor Expert do it for me, but until I get around to trying, I won't know for sure.
If you try to attach an LCD, you will find that the documentation is minimal. The LCD driver software "provided on the support CD" won't assemble using the CW-SE assembler. The application note that talks about interfacing an LCD to the HC12 (AN1774/D, rev 1.0) assumes that the LCD is attached as a 4- or 8-bit bus device, which is not how it would be attached to the evaluation board if you used one of the built-in connectors.
Despite all this, I still believe the evaluation board together with the Multilink BDM is a cost-effective way to get started connecting a micro to an Ethernet...at least that's why I'm working with them. I'm very much a "newbie" in this particular area, and I just wish the learning process were not so unnecessarily painful.
Good luck!