> Lots of great suggestions. One note of caution - make sure your hardware 
> will support the distribution you want to use.
> 
> For example, I could not install RH, SuSe, or Mandrake on an older computer 
> because (1) I had to install over the net because I could not use the 
> floppy and CD at the same time and the CD was not bootable; and (2) I did 
> not have enough memory for the net installation of these distros. However, 
> Debian installed flawlessly over the net and runs my little webserver very 
> well.

I have a similar problem when installing linux to my laptop.  I overcome it by 
creating a small partition on the drive and putting a copy of the dosutils 
folder from the cd onto the drive.  boot to that drive and then load linux from 
the dosutils and go through the install from the cdrom.