So... I know this dance has been done. Seen many other posts, it did not work for me. Seems there weren't much "solid" solutions.
I have this CP2102 USB to TTL/UART programmer, it looks exactly like this but i didn't buy from this site.
http://www.buyincoins.com/item/4022.html
Tested on Mac(OSX 10.7.5) and Windows7 it just doesn't want to work. I have tried different baud rates, the reset/upload "trick" and messed around in the terminal with screen. Even just tried to switch the Tx/Rx. My first try was with the USB Tx to the ATMega's Rx and vice versa.
Same layout as the Arduino on a breadboard.
Attached is a bit more info too.
I bought an ATMEGA328p-pu with a bootloader on it already.
Plugging the ATMega328p-pu into an Uno R2 works, same chip right, but i don't want to pry a chip off the board every time i need to re-program it.
Hope we can fix this here and now.
I would love the help guys and gals.
Thanks
Fix: Just keep trying the Upload/reset trick. For my ATMega328P-PU I used the Uno Board, AVRISP mkII programmer and with the verbose output as your indicator, when the uploader starts with its "avrdude: send" you can hit the reset.