bootp or dhcp?

[Vincent Murphy <murphyv@wisdom.ucc.ie>]

I want to set up a lab of machines here at college. I would like these machines
to not know their own IP address when they're booting, but have it assigned to
them by another machine based on their ethernet addresses. bootp and dhcp are
two systems I've heard of that apparently can be used for this kind of thing,
but know nothing else about. What's the difference between them? All these
machines have static IP addresses assigned to them.

What do I have to do to set up a Debian (Hamm) box to have it's IP address
assigned in this way?

thanks etc.
vincent murphy