Ya. You can install Debian from a floppy.
You need a couple disks, one for boot the other for root. Then you need to have a network controller that is well supported and have high speed internet access.
Then you can install Debian from floppies. Keep in mind that very few people do it this way so you may run into certain difficulties since it's not going to be well tested. But otherwise it should be the same as installing from a cdrom. The directions, unfortunatelly can be quite confusing sometimes...
Debian has their installation method here:
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual
If you know linux fairly well and have a linux distro handy you can do some other sort of installs..
Other ways to install Debian are:
From a netinstall cdrom (this is the prefered method)
From a full installation cdrom set if you don't have good internet access. You can buy these from lots of different places for next to nothing.
From a chroot enviroment. This is the highly technical way were you start off with a debootstrap script to do a minimalist Debian installation onto your harddrive from a chroot enviroment. Usually one you create manually while booted up in a knoppix-style cdrom or from a already installed linux operating system. This way is also outlined in the installation manual.
From a USB memory stick. This would be good for servers that don't have a cdrom drive.
If you can get your system to boot off of the network, this is also a option.
One thing that people will often do in situations like this is to actually remove the harddrive from your laptop, buy a adapter so that you can plug it into a desktop computer. Then you install Linux onto that desktop computer, then shutdown, remove the drive and put it back into the laptop. Hopefully everything should autodetect and you'd be up and running.
As you can see there are lots of options. And there are a couple other that I've not covered here.
