Newbie install help

["Paul McKinley" <sk.web@btinternet.com>]

Hello,

I am new to Debian Linux. I have a very slow internet access and its not
flat rate. How would I go about downloading the bare minimum in order to
get a Linux box to boot? My system is an AMD Athlon 1.33GHz, with 1GB
RAM. I need no sound, I do need Ethernet drivers, my cards are Kingston
KNE100TX, and AMD PCnet. I need a bare minimum kernel with which I can
build the 2.4.17 kernel; I therefore need GCC and the kernel package. I
need not have X to begin with, just be able to get it once the kernel is
booted.

My mainboard is ASUS A7V 133, my harddisks are on a Promise ATA100 RAID
controller and two are in RAID-0, two are in RAID-1. My cdrom drives are
on the standard IDE controllers.

I have Windows 2000 (SP2) installed already, so ideally would like to
dualboot. I have had some bad experiences with Linux installers
overwriting the windows bootloader, how do I avoid this?

Thanks,
Paul