Goal: dual boot yellowdog with osx disklessly

iBook 300mhz / 64mb / 6gb / usb / enet100

I've got a Clamshell I book and for the past few days I've been trying very diligently to find info on how to boot up linux diskless (because the cd-rom drive can't read my cheap cd-rs and I'm not ready to give in and buy the expensive, highly reflective, quality cd-rs that it can read - plus all this problem solving, aside from giving me a headache, is pretty fun.

I've figured out how OpenFirmware relates to the boot process and made it as far as:
0> boot hd:12,\install\yaboot

yaboot begins (yellowdog) and asks for installation instructions. When I use the default it says that it can't read the cd drive (since it's an unpacked iso that I'm booting from that much makes since).

I tried to edit yaboot.conf to tell it to look for the vmlinux on the hard drive, but that failed.

So:
boot: hd:12,\install\vmlinux
and I even got a penguin up for 30 seconds before I fot an error about not being able to mount the disk with root permissions (hfs+)
vfs cannot open root device "sda2" please append correct "root=" boot option

so I reformatted the partition (hfs) because I remembered reading about that problem.
now all I can get is:
elf32 loading
and then it stops and gives an error

tried putting vmlinux in the X system folder (ufs) and yabooting it
no luck

haven't tried OpenFirmware yabooting on ufs
haven't tried BootP or tftp net booting (have no idea how)
considering trying to tell OpenFirmware to look for boot files on my usb-key.

In the meantime any help would be so greatly appreciated.