check the output of df -h again.. see if you have 1+ GB available on your / partition.

is there a different deb i should be downloading? instead of install tool should i be using kde install (boot from sd only)

No.. thats only if you want KDE.. and only after you're successfully booting to the SD card.

i installed it all again just for sheer boredom lol, and everything stayed the same, memory was higher for the device after booting from mmc2, but the internal was still 60mb and device is 388.4mb now. i tried xterm and all the info i pasted earlier is still the same, no difference. it did boot from mmc2 sure of that, just curious about the internal memory card. even when i look at file manager internal card has no files in it, should there be?

No.. i think that's the fat partition you are seeing.

This is in my MMC booted diablo's df -h:

/dev/mmcblk1p2 1.6G 455M 1.1G 29% /
/dev/mmcblk0p1 119.7m 30.9m 88.8m 26% /media/mmc2

The first one there is the bulk of the installation on the 1.6G partition. The second line is what shows up in the Internal Card .. a useless FAT partition. U should see something similar.

~ $ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mmcblk0p2 4.0M 2.2M 1.8M 54% /mnt/initfs
none 512.0k 88.0k 424.0k 17% /mnt/initfs/tmp
/dev/mmcblk0p2 834.3M 400.9M 391.1M 51% /
none 512.0k 88.0k 424.0k 17% /tmp
none 1.0M 60.0k 964.0k 6% /dev
tmpfs 1.0M 0 1.0M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/mmcblk0p1 60.4M 408.0k 60.0M 1% /media/mmc2
~ $

is what xterm says

so any ideas?

is that a 1GB or 2GB SD card?

You are booted from MMC.. your / has 834MB which is more than the internal Flash on these things.. I just curious why so small.. but it looks to me like it's a 1GB SD card, 800MB used for the OS and 60mb for your FAT partition and probably something quite trivial (64mb?) for your swap

i went to the store to try a new memory card, i had a 2 gb in there but i thought maybe i'd try a new one incase this one has an issue. i'll let you know if it works

so now with the new 2 gb card it say it is unable to install, and it corrupts the new card. so i reformat it and try again, and get the same response. it only says while installing the the card is corrupt or unformated