Woody is the stable release, but woody-netinst is not yet stable? Is it experimental? That loos a little strange to me. Can somebody make it clear? Thanks

There are no official netinstall images for Debian 3.0 ('woody'). If you for some reason are worried about that, just get the first full CD then.

Any particular reasons why you want to install 'woody'? As that is nearly three years old now... It just can't provide an enjoyable desktop/workstation usage experience, and there are great difficulties to get it installed with certain hardware with it as well (e.g. SATA controllers are not supported). Of course if you are going to install a mission-critical server and all your hardware is supported, then of course it is understandable.

For desktop/workstation usage I strongly recommend installing Debian testing ('sarge', what will become the 3.1 release) instead as that contains up-to-date software on nearly everything with a few exceptions.

That is what i did, but i just asked, because it seemed strange; the first CD of "woody" could be easily -i think- turned into a netinst.

I tried the first CD of Sarge for my hp c360, but it didn't work. It reports, that a suitable CD-ROM driver wasn't found. Sarge-netinst doesn't work either. It asks me if i would like to put one from a floppy, but i have no floppy driver installed. The strange thing however is that "Woody" had no problem; it found the driver. Why did that happen?

Have you tried Debian SID?

I'm planning to work the machine as a server. SID is unstable. My main problem is the CD-ROM drivers now; how can they exist in Woody CD1 and not in Sarge CD1?

I don't know why that situation occurs. Remember that there has been a lot of of development between those two, some drivers have been rewritten or replaced, and some things may have fallen in the cracks, like the support for your CDROM drive... I can't answer anything more specific at this moment.

You can upgrade an installation of Debian 'woody' to Debian 'sarge' though. I have written some instructions on how to do so: http://serios.net/content/debian/upgrade.php
(That document is in a need of slight updating though, or at least in need of me going through the procedure and seeing if there are any new quirks that have showed up during the year+ since I wrote that, but the instructions should still apply)

That solution went through my mind, but because of lack of knowledge around Debian (and lack of time) at the present i wouldn't try it. Your tutorial looks nice however; i will give it a try. Thanks.

I have now updated/improved the Upgrade Debian Stable to Testing/Unstable instructions.

Sid ine pio kalo pio up to date megale: )