There were no particular issues in the install except for the lack of support in the 2.2.18pre21 kernel for the Ethernet card (3c905C-TX) in this machine.
The disk was partitioned into two: one for swap (2GB as /dev/sda2) and the rest for everything else (65GB as /dev/sda1).
The NIC (ethernet card) driver (3c59x) in this release (kernel 2.2.18pre21) does not appear to support the 3Com 3c905C-TX card. The kernel needed to be upgraded to a 2.2.19 kernel on a more recent release (e.g., Debian 3.0 woody beta--see Section 3.7.5 for details of making a CD-ROM available to apt-get):
# apt-get install kernel-image-2.2.19
The networking began working just fine. In moving to the unstable release (after a dist-upgrade) kernel-image-2.4.14-686-smp was installed without effort (except for initrd addition to lilo)
Sound card support from the kernel required adding the following line to /etc/modules.conf (by adding it to /etc/modutils/sndconfig then running update-modules:
alias sound-slot-0 i810_audio
A modprobe can be used to load the module. Refer to documentation in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sound/ for details.
To ensure the module is loaded at boot time add i810_audio to /etc/modules.