O.k. Harry! I spend all night reading the online instructions on FIPs (there seem to be conflicting instructions among some of them) and installing a dual-boot system. Apparently it works - I got much the same partitions table as before I took the PC back to the shop.

FYI:
Go to the documentation for FIPs v2.0, first read the FIP.DOC, download the FIPs v2.0 zip file, then make a boot floppy by copying the FIPs files RESTORRB.EXE, FIPS.EXE and ERRORS.TXT to the disk. When you start FIPSs, you will be given the opportunity to write backup copies of your root & boot sector to a file on drive A: called ROOTBOOT.00x (x=0,1,...etc). Boot from the FIPs floppy and do the resizing & partition creation as described in FIP.DOC.

I resized the C drive and created a second primary DOS partition of about 1.7G. Then I rebooted the PC before booting from the Debian CD (the one that came with the book - Debian 3.1 "Sarge").

After walking thru the installion and briefly config DCHP manually (by entering IP, netmask, gateway etc), I then came upon the partition options. I first deleted the second primary partition that I created with FIPs and created the 1.7G free space for debian-linux install, from there let the installer autoconfig for three linux partitions:

#2---primary---649.8MB---ext3---/
#5---primary---106.9MB---swap---swap
#5---logical---1.0GB---ext3---/home

The first partition is #1 primary consisting of 2.5GB fat32 where Win98 lives. After confirming and writing the partition, I then when prompted, installed the debian GRUB, confirm and ended this installation. Rebooting into the GRUB went o.k. - there are four boot options: debian, debian-safe, Win98 and other system. Debian and Win98 worked o.k. In linux, I'm in debian shell prompt.

When I installed the software, I chosen the cdrom as the method which apt access the debian archive. There is an option for network resource -- how do I get that option? What about the GNOME desktop? Most importantly of all I have no idea if the network DCHP config o.k. The debian shell, of course I will work with but later on.

By the way, the NIC (network interface card) was switched off - I had to enabled it from the BIOS setting, so now I have inaddition to this network adapter scientific-atlanta WebSTAR 2000 series cable modem, I also have 3Com Fast Etherlink XL 10/100MB Ethenet NIC.