I have a kindle DX (the original, before international) and would greatly appreciate the results of this project. I have a college freshman level education in computer science, and I am very comfortable messing around with technology but have little to no coding experience. I am willing to do whatever to assist you with this, and if it will speed things along, I will extract the rootFS image for you. Let me know.
Edit: I have also brought the kindle subreddit's attention to this thread --
http://www.reddit.com/r/kindle/comme...n_the_updated/