Success! I had been trying as root before but must have forgotten the last time. Thanks for putting up with my newbieness.

Of course no good dead goes unpunished. In my haste I forgot to cd to my debian partition and started to extract to /home/user. It quickly ran out of space so I stopped it. Is there any easy way to figure out what I can and can't delete?

The debian apps do seem to run quite a bit faster now. I installed a few apps when running from the image and they seem to be in my /home/user directory. Is there a way to use them now or do I need to reinstall them?

Thanks again!