I have a ten or twelve year old Sharp PC-8650 laptop. It's a 486 with 8 or 16 or so MB RAM. Floppy drive, no CD drive, serial port, no ethernet. Previously, I've installed Slackware off of a series of thirty or so floppies, but now I've bought a PCMCIA ethernet card.

Ideally, I'd like to install Debian somehow, but I'm not sure how to do it. I don't really want to make another 50 billion floppies, and was wondering if there's some way I could install it with a boot floppy that has some ethernet drivers on it, and then complete the installation by downloading the rest. If there's no way to do this, is it possible under any distribution?

Thank you for your time

you can do a network install of debian... I did on an older machine I have with no cdrom.

http://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst

There is some information... there is i think 6 floppies.. but you should only need the first 2 or 3. I think rescue, root and a driver disk. The link above explains in a little detail but it might go over your head if you are a noob.

later
trey