Wow! Thanks for the tip, Poky really saved my week.
I don't have an SD card at hand, so I am running from an NFS mount on the desktop. Here is how:
First, upgrade LoLo to version 2.4, in order to be able to pass a command line to Linux.
Then copy Poky's zImage called
"zImage-2.6.19.2-pinky-3.1-mx31litekit.bin" to a YAFFS system in NAND's first partition (there are instructions on how to do this all-around).
Set up the 'host' NFS server with the following line in /etc/exports:
/opt/poky/rootfs 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0(rw,all_squash,anonuid=1000)
Where
/opt/poky/rootfs is the absolute path where I (carefully) untared Poky's rootfs
"poky-image-sato-mx31litekit-pinky-3.1.rootfs.tar.gz"
NFS options are such that any remote user will act as user #1000 on your system (hopefully you!).
Now you can boot anytime with the following compound line on LoLo:
mount yaffs /dev/nand0a /boot;load raw 0x80100000 1721464 /boot/zImage;exec -t "ip=192.168.0.100 root=/dev/nfs nfsroot=192.168.0.200:/opt/poky/rootfs rw noinitrd console=ttymxc0,115200 irqpoll"
Where 192.168.0.100 is your i.MX31LITE IP address, and 192.168.0.200 is your NFS host address.
Try several times before giving up on an NFS error, they are common!
Hopefully at some point you have seen the system come up and a login prompt waits for you:
OpenedHand Linux (Poky) 3.1 sixcam ttymxc0
imx31litekit login:
Just enter as "root", no password!
Finally, you may want to get rid of all the graphical stuff, specially if you don't have an LCD. That is cleanly solved with the following command:
root@mx31litekit:~# ipkg -recursive remove libx*