I am trying to get linux onto a 1998 vintage Gateway 2000 laptop
Pentium-233mhz MMX 32 Megs of Ram, 3 gigs of disk, split 2 gig/1 gig
It has usb. win2k works, swapping continually. No Network card, no cdrom, but floppy works. No usb booting from the bios.

I installed a base Fedora system on my own box, tarred it, & shrunk it onto a usb stick, and got it on drive C: with windows. Then I booted tomsrtbt, untarred it on the second partition, and made a grub boot floppy, making every possible mistake along the way. Now I'm getting a boot which freezes. The i686 kernel seems to provide a initrd, but the i586 kernel seems not to. Using the initrd from the i686 kernel, I am getting this:
..
Yenta ISA IRQ mask 0x0000 PCI irq 10
Socket status 30000007
usb <is found without error>
PNP No ps/2 controller found. Probing ports directly
input <finds keyboard>
TCP bic registered
Initializing XFRM netlink socket
NET: Registered protocol family 1
NET: Registered protocol family 17
Using IPI No-shortcut mode
Magic number: 11:260:993
drivers/rtc/hctosys.c unable to open device (rtc0)
Freeing unused kernel memory: 236k freed
Write protecting kernel read-only data: 803k
input: PS2++ Logitech Touchpad 3 as /class/input/input2

And there it freezes. I can't find an i586 initrd. rpm appears not to behave according to the man page. It hasn't mounted the root partition or found init. The grub boot lines are:
title SMALL_FEDORA
root (fd0) #we are on a floppy!
kernel (hd0,4)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7 ro root=/dev/sda5 rhgb
initrd (hd0,4)/boot/initrd-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7.img

I have edited those lines and hit 'tab' for completions and it can find the files. I don't know how to similarly check the root= parameter. It's ide, btw. But you have to use sda - don't ask me, ask them!
Any ideas welcome.