Good news: Rapier works now (at least seemed to) with the latest svn change if the sword package actually includes the whole /usr/share/sword/* directory, and not only the locales (it needs this as a default module repository to copy file from). Can this be changed in sword16 ?
Bad news: the drive that i used for my dekstop and for storing virtual machines just died, so i have no more desktop, nor sdk for a while.