Damon dabbled, > Seeing Debian is such an internet-centric (ie., apt) distribution, it > would be nice if you could install the whole thing with one the one or > two boot disks (I'm sure you can with redhat). Even if the boot disk had > a little FTP client (like wget or curl), so you could switch to a VT and > put them on that newly made EXT2 partition.
This *is* the install method for FreeBSD. But they had to go to two disks about two releases ago, seems they'v accumulated too many drivers. --

