Well, for a long while the Kad GUI was present but non-functional. It now seems to be functional, although I don't know if the functionality is complete. So, your aMule CVS might be a bit dated, or the functionality doesn't work for downloading a nodes.dat.
In any case, you can just download it with your web browser, curl, wget, or whatever. Then just stick the file in the ~/.aMule directory and start aMule.