Brainless Debian Stable installation and usage?

["Steve Litt of Troubleshooters.Com" <littdom@gmail.com>]

Hi all,

I have several friends, with Windows XP, who are now considering moving
to Linux because of XP's impending stoppage of support. Normally, I'd
just tell them to install Xubuntu. But some of these people have memory
starved machines, and in my travels I've found that, using the Network
Install, Debian installs in anything 128MB or above. Most other
distros, even if they could somehow *run* in such memory starved
machines, can't install in them due to the bloat of their GUI
installers.

What I'd like to do with my friends is:

1: Install them toward the *right* Wheezy network install image for
   their CPU. I've never been able to easily find the right network
   install image, and just sort of used whatever I could find.
2: Tell them how to use the network install CD to install Debian sans
   GUI.
3: Tell them to apt-get install xfce4 xfce4-goodies
4: Tell them how to make Xfce be what runs when they issue the startx
   command.
5: Tell them how to make iceweasel play youtube videos (I think today I
   saw someone on this list say to go to youtube.com/html5 : Is that a
   good solution in general?)
6: Are you guys cool with my friends, who would all be raw newbies,
   joining this list?

Thanks,

SteveT

Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance