Thanks again for the pointer -- I've travelled down that particular road alone...as per original post my /tmp is not a partition of type tempfs (ramfs) and I cannot create it manually using mount and appropriate params, this means I'm limited to about 1.5M in root and /tmp is a real folder in root (the free space shadowed out of the flashrom) which isn't enough room to copy an image into (i.e. physically onto the box) hence my seeking an unpacked and hopefully un-fu'd image which I can boot from over NFS. In case it's not clear I can telnet into the DM after booting and have access to the serial boot console, during booting the "GP" logo is displayed and initial device setup follows -- the image on the DM as shipped just doesn't work for me.#
I'm figuring the JTAG mod will rewrite /dev/mtd2, I'm looking to rewrite /dev/mtd0 (the entire flash ROM) and with a good netboot I should just be able to use dreamup for that. Of course I could be a million miles off with this but netboot itself will be non-distructive. I suppose I could always find and build an image from the tuxbox source if necessary but that's a longer job, at least for me.