The disk was partitioned into two: one for swap (1GB as /dev/hda2) and the rest for everything else (39GB as /dev/hda1).
The ethernet driver (3c59x) in this release (kernel 2.2.18pre21) does not support the 3Com 3c905C-TX card. The kernel needed to be upgraded to a 2.4.6 kernel on a more recent release (e.g., Debian 3.0 woody beta CD-ROM--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-2.4.18-686 was installed without effort (except for initrd addition to lilo--see Sections 4.8 and 4.10.1)
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 then 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.