You might as well just install a modern debian based operating system. Apt can be used with rpms however

you can install rpm in a deb distro so i don't see why you couldn't install dpkg in an rpm distro,

so you'll need dpkg and a deb to rpm converter, alien goes the other way but i'm not sure what you'd use for this.
access a deb repo such as ubuntu or debian and download aptitude, run dpkg aptitude.deb or whatever it'd be called, then dpkg --configure -a,
now you need to add some deb repo's to your /etc/apt file, or whatever it's called,
now you need to type sudo apt-get install synaptic and you should have a fully fuctional aptitude system up n running

Jumping from 2.2 to 2.6 is a huge jump. Just install a current distro that is built around the kernel you want to use.

While using rpm on deb (or the other way around) can be done, it is far from ideal.