ok thanks I will message you.

--edit--

Thanks for the offer, but I must have missed you.  I think I finally got what I was doing wrong!  I was treating openwrt as any normal flavor of linux, but it is far from it... its more like it just turns  your pi into a fancied router that can mine bitcoin.  Just incase someone stumbles over this thread I will put the instructions I wish I had.

--If your Avalon is not running OpenWRT and you want the latest firmware/cgminer--

How to get OpenWRT mining on your Raspberry pi (or at least what I did and seemed to work):

Download one of the images of openwrt from firmware page (I used the sd-ext4)
Download the raspberry pi root folder archive
Flash the openwrt image to your card
Plug it into your computer with an ethernet cord and enable that connection (disable others) & log in using Putty > telnet connection: 192.168.1.1
type passwd and set the root password
exit putty
take the sd card back out of the pi
boot a linux distro on your PC with the SD card connected to the PC
download / move the raspberrypi root filesystem archive to linux
open a terminal as superuser and or sudo nautilus
overwrite the old sd card filesystem / replace files with the one from the archive
navigate to the /etc/conf folder and set the network settings to what you would set a normal static IP client on your network as (not as a router)
you can now log into the web configuration by typing the IP you just set in the network conf files


After that it is pretty self explanatory... miner settings are right there in the web config as well as many other things.

Thanks to everyone on these boards or I never would have figured it out