tried out evince. it gagged on the pdf i linked to in the original post here, took a couple minutes to open and then wouldn't scroll. i figured that as good a time as any to try out the swapping...

dd works, mkswap works. when i try to swapon i get "operation not permitted" i'm doing the "file as swap" version, not the fdisk version. i tried installing that guy's unix util deb to get fdisk and it said it was already installed, but i have no /sbin/fdisk.