excellent, smithers! this worked. basically I:
1) put in a blank 3GB IDE drive and installed Redhat on it (after messing with freedos and a basic RH boot floppy that can't do anything without the CD anyway

2) slapped the Amithlon HD back in the machine on the other IDE channel, and rebooted into RH again
3) followed Bernd's instructions on copying the .gz files onto the RH boot dir so GRUB would see them, edited the boot list file;
4) took out the Amithlon CD, rebooted again, selected the 'amithlon' OS in the menu and voila, here I am (a few config changes later) on the machine, using Miami/Ibrowse to post this note.
thanks for the help!

Now I can likely sell my desktop amiga sitting in front of me and transfer most of its information to this machine (has a 30GB hd, I don't think I'll be using it up anytime soon, this ain't Bloatware2000 like my work craptop, after all

kevin orme
amiga university
www.amigau.com