Yep, I've seen win95 on floppies.. and it ain't pretty. Something like 2 shoeboxes full of floppies.
Of course debian net install is only going to work if he has a network connection!
Stuff like that you have to be creative....
You could set up a serial port connection to your main machine and copy the cab files over and install from those. Or the needed deb files.
Or if your a windows man and have network connectivity you can use a dos network boot floppy. This can be used on any lan that supports netbuie protocol or ipx/spx.
You just got to figure out how to get the proper dos drivers for you nic card and you got gold.
I personally have done this several times years ago when all I had was small lan, a cd password of MS office 97, 1 cd-rom drive, and three pentium 1 era machines that I was able to salvage from discarded husks from my dads work.
This is actually the best way to install win9x in my opinion. You don't even have to have a win9x disk laying around as long as the person installing your hardware had the forsight to install the cab files along with the setup program (easy to do, you copied the folder from the cd after the install.
It's quicker then a cd install on ancient machines and you have all the paths for the drivers set up going to your cab files by default.
Dos network boot, howto Hope that link is usefull, but the part about compressing the filespace wasn't something I did.
here's a variation It's been so long since i've tried this.
however if you don't have a normal network link...
If you have to go over a serial line, then it will take for ever at 117Kbits or whatever that hardware can support.
You also need a special type of serial cable known as a null modem cable. If you have a old external modem cable that may work or you can still get them at some places and the term most people use is a lap-link cable.
Then you install dos on the laptop and install a ppp packer driver or some sort of driver so you can interact with the serial port file sharing that is aviable in win9X... I don't know about XP or 2000 though...
For me, I used a old laptop as a extra terminal for my linux computer for a long time. It ran DOS and I installed kermit and used that for a terminal emulation over the serial line. Then I had a dos ppp packet driver and a old NCSA ftp client to transfer files using a everyday ftp server on my Linux box. I eventually installed a bunch of abandonware games on it and game it to my siblings to play with.
However if you have a network connection on your laptop you will get maximum functionality from debian, but with probably not much going in the way of a gui.
