Debian GNU/Linux is huge. To download the entire “Lenny” distribution for just the one “i386” architecture would require 31 disks. However, I only downloaded the first 5 disks, as the packages are archived in order of popularity (so you can get the most commonly used packages by just downloading a few disk images — leaving the others to be ignored, installed later, or installed over the internet). As an additional convenience, Debian now provides two different first disks: one for Gnome users and one for KDE users. Since I primarily use KDE, I chose the latter of course. This should make very little difference for the purposes of this installation (it will matter more when I start trying to personalize the systems, but that’s for a later column).