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It failed miserably (booting i386 from 4 floppies), then switched to a machine with a floppy drive that hasn't been rotting idle for years, and it worked first time. Read errors are the bane of floppy installs.
I admit cheating, I switched the ISA network cards for one with a PCI card, couldn't be bothered to fiddle around when we have a 3com card going begging.
This was all generic/old/desktop/cheap/clone IBM Compatible PC, what no CD, but the hardware detection was excellent (what we did, spotting multiple PCI network cards, and even spotting which had the LAN cable plugged in!). As a server box I didn't try any of the fancy stuff, just picked "testing" from the list of Debian flavours, and stuck the smallest install possible.
Downsides? It stuck a fair amount of unneeded software on my server - did I say I wanted GCC (or Exim for that matter?) - I may experiment removing it to illuminate the dependencies involved. The install was still pretty quick despite the extra stuff over a 2Mbps connection.
Was very impressed the DI team have the manuals for all architectures, in all languages, and they even go to the detail of telling you stuff anyone installing an OS should know already, and cover all major (and minor) methods of installing from floppy, CD-ROM, CD-ROM net-inst, USB flash image (several methods), etc etc. There is stuff I don't like about the latest DI, but it does what it says on the tin, and does it well. Looks like the documentation is ready for release!
That said whilst I read the manual, once you have the floppies labelled "boot" "root" "cd drivers" "net drivers" you don't need the manual if you have enough clue to insert the one labelled "boot" first (if you don't have you considered other career options), and nothing major goes wrong.
Oh and before you ask this server is for me testing out config for a much newer machine which even has a working CD-ROM (oh bliss).
Debian installs are "well easy if you know what I mean like". -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
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