Debian + Laptop

[Spot]

I have an older laptop, HP Omnibook 4100, P2-233, 64 meg ram, NeoMagic Display adapter, Crystal PnP Audio, and a 4G hdd. I figured it would make a nice linux workstation and was going to try out Debian this time. The machine currently has Win98se on it(grr...123 floppies to get the cab files over to it) and seems to run flawlessly under 98se, so I was figuring on dual booting it until I got comfortable with Debian.
Any ideas which release would be most suitable for this particular machine? I know it's not the most powerful, but I was hoping X of some sort would be able to run ok, if not, I can deal with console.
Also, it has no cd-rom, so I'd have to install via FTP, which I've done before with Redhat, but no other distro. Does Debian install ok via FTP? It took me about 40 attempts with RH 6.2 but now that it's up and running, I haven't had a problem with it aside from a timing problem with tin.
Ideas/suggstions would be appreciated.

...Spot

[Semp]

I'm always happy with the stable release. I do a net install so my packages will be up-to-date. Also, XFree is easier to configure in the stable branch.

[trommaster]

isn't one of _THE_ main Debian Install options from ftp?

I would assume it will work....

[Spot]

I ended up going with the Woddy installation, as the stable pcmcia boot floppy didn't support my NIC, and I had no idea how to go about customizing a boot floppy. Debian and I *did not* get along well at all until about the 3rd attempt at installation, where I was finally able to get gnome up and running.

Unfortunately, I had to go out of town within a couple of days, *needed* my laptop to be fully functional, and didn't have time to mess with configuring a distro from scratch, so just for the hell of it, I tried to load up Mandrake 8.1
It installed without any major hitches, and has been running on the machine ever since...flawlessly.