I have a toshiba laptop that I got a basic installation of Debian on. I have it connected to my Windows XP box by ethernet cable through a hub. On my windows box, I have a USB wi-fi adapter to pick up an internet signal. ::whew::
I have a DHCP server as well as a proxy server running on my windows machine, and the debian laptop successfully picks up an IP address from the DHCP server.

However, I don't know how to configure the laptop to use the proxy server. I assume that if I could just tell the laptop to use the proxy server's address and ports, it would pick up the internet through the USB wi-fi.

Does that make sense? If there is a better way of doing it.. like configuring the linksys USB wi-fi on my rudimentary debian install without more packages, that would be fine. Any help would be awesome!

While installing debin net-install installer itself ask about proxy server, username etc. Do you wanna update debina or wanna get packages from Internet? I'm assuming that you have working debian lappy and you just wanna get more packages ... clear this first for me...