I ran the installer with the power kernel installed, and it took a long time (as usual), 1h 20 mins to extract, but no reboot this time. I wonder if I should depend upon the power kernel?
Nokia-N900-42-11:/home/user/MyDocs/core-dumps# time lzma -d debian-m5-v3d.img.ext2.lzma real 7m 32.66s user 3m 34.14s sys 0m 35.03s