<>>> Installing Debian is like being greased, and wrestling with an eel.
Installing Debian imho does not have to be difficult, the new installer under Sarge should drag you through it quickly and easily. I'd like to say more but very quickly, if you use the /quiet switch when istalling Debian you will get very few questions and a quick install. I use a floppy / minimum cd install followed by anything else required over the net. To get the latest packages first time around I use a large http proxy at my firewall / gateway and so the latest packages are stored locally for any machine that needs them, this way you can mess up the install and trash it time and time again and get back to where you were very easily, to get your packages via http your apt sources list might look like this:
deb http://mirror.ox.ac.uk/debian/ stable main contrib non-free deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib non-free deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free
<digressing slightly> To look for and download the latest packages nightly (including security updates) I run the following crontab entry which then sends me an email letting me know what has been downloaded ready for install, the crontab entry looks like this:
# Look for updates daily 0 3 * * * (apt-get update && apt-get -dy upgrade) | mail -s "`hostname` update" nicka
Hope this is of interest to someone, Nick