Debian over the net is a no go over dial-up?!? 

*gets out cane, hunches back*

When I was your age, I installed Debian over a 28.8 modem. Kids these days!!!

Errr...yeah. Anyway...if I had to pick a distro to install over a
modem, Debian would be it. ISOs...blah who needs em? You haven't lived
until you've installed debian from floppies! (I did the entire base
off floppies once...I think it took around 20...)

Anyway, in all honesty all you need to get Debian firing is 3 Floppies
(rescue, root, drivers) Assuming that you've got a supported modem or
ethernet card. (might need one of the bigger floppy sets for ppp...I
don't recall exactly.)

Once you've got even that much of a minimul Debian system, you can
indeed download the base tgz, and your up and running and ready to
fire up apt-get, dselect, or even tasksel for the lazy. Depending on
how many packages you need to get going...you can get away with 100mb.
(xserver, mozilla, a light window manager like blackbox, irc
client...something to read mail, new kernel.)

After that spend some time in dselect, aptitude, tasksel, whatever,
add a cron job to run apt-get -dy dselect-upgrade at like 2am, and by
the time you get home from work everything should be downloaded.
Downloading and burning the Debian ISO's is a waste of time and CDRs.
Do it over the net...

OK, so on dial-up you might want to install the basics off a CDrom.
But you're not going to get away with saying installing Debian over a
modem is not an option...cause it is. Been there, done that.

-- 
Andrew S. Zbikowski | http://andy.zibnet.us
 A password is like your underwear; Change it
 frequently, don't share it with others, and
     don't ask to borrow someone else's.

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