After crying a little bit more, I decided to return to the Debian web site and try to find another iso that actually installed something I could use. (needless to say, their website is very difficult to navigate, and their distribution layout, confusing).

http://cdimage.debia...1a/i386/iso-cd/

Finally, I made it, I downloaded the first CD from that directory (apparently all you need is the first disc, and the other discs are there to confound dozers who are trying to build a server). http://cdimage.debia...a-i386-CD-1.iso

I downloaded that crazy CD, put it into my very old Dell and let her rip into the HDD. This time I was greeted with a nice little load screen that gave me the options install, help, advanced, and graphical install. How nice, but when I tried to do graphical install, it gave my some weird error that I could barely read... Something like video something or other... I don't know, but it prevented me from seeing anything on the screen anymore, so I tried the regular install since that's probably why the option was put there. And. Same thing... wtf... Well, after some more crying, I googled and found that doing vga=normal worked. So I went into help, and it returned me to the boot: prompt after displaying a message, and I typed in:

install vga=normal

Ding! It worked, I set up the rest of the machine and it loaded up gnome which has become the fan favorite of the linux crowd since kde 4.0 apparently blew it.

I asked the installer to install SSH for me, but not the web server cause I will manually be doing that.
Gnome was installed and working automatically, which gave me a nice user interface that would prove to freeze sporadically when I attempted to operate my computer! I've finally broken linux in!

With SSH already installed and taken care of, I just need to download putty onto my handy windows machine and I can 'telnet' into my linux box and work with it in the same way major web hosts allow you to!

I'm going to add a few initial configurations to our installation to make it more awesome here: