don't know if qole is listening, but i seem to remember going through his scripts that the debian partition wasn't mounted in such a way that the write cache was disabled. is there any downside to mounting it write cache disabled? in any case i might temporaily mount it write cache disabled (sync? or something) and see if i can install stuff. will report back in a few days, unless qole jumps in advising me that i'm in danger of bricking my phone.