Andrew Zbikowski said:
> One more idea...
>
> Debian still has a floppy based netboot. You need 5 floppies to get up
> and running, and then it's all network based.

That's sort of my next plan. There's a web site [1] that has made a set of
Fedora install floppies, which would work on my machine except that Fedora
doesn't work on any 486 any more. (The older versions might work, but
upgrading would not be fun.)

I plan to make such a set of floppies for Ubuntu using the Mini ISO, which
is only 9.1MB, so it should fit on 7 floppies, or 6 if I make 1.7MB
floppies, plus one for the boot diskette. It should allow a direct network
install without requiring any OS to be installed.

[1] http://www.thisiscool.com/fcfloppy.htm