Thanks to the folks on the list...
I now have my soekris m0n0wall hooked up
in parallel with my existing soekris pebble,
but with different IP's....
and I have my laptop on the LAN, but
using 10.248.126.2 instead of .1 for default gw....

and lynx does work for https - even v.2.8 which is 18 months old.

just for the record, manuel, keep the gui the way it is,
It appears to be manageable just fine from lynx
(takes practice).

now I can work on things like forwarding ssh, etc.
(important for working on things from out on the WAN)

Thanks
Seth