big mistake, I meant Jessie, not sid, from the exegnu isos. Thanks for the suggestion, it did not seem to work tho, but i saw an update on the trinity site, downloading now, will check it later.
An updated exegnu iso is now posted with a populated /boot/grub/ i386-pc .. this should sort any grub issues.. hope this works for anyone affected!
BTW the exegnu images are not "official TDE" however the trinity site links "distros" which use TDE.
Previously exegnu was standard Debian Stable + TDE but is now Devuan-based (essentially Debian Stable without systemd)
D