My dot.Tiger Franken.dot.station got a different hard disk last night, and is 2/3 complete 
installing Mandrake Linux 9.1. I downloaded and burned the first two Mandrake ISO's, and the dot.Tiger booted successfully from Mandrake CD #1 in the IDE CD-ROM drive. It loaded the setup kernel, started the installation process, and then complained 
that it couldn't read files from the IDE CD-ROM drive it had just booted from. Tried with another CD burned at 2X, and with alternate CD-ROM kernel modules, but still no success reading from the drive at this point.
Fortunately, Linux 
is kind enough to offer downloading all the files from the installation CDs via NFS, HTTP, or FTP protocols. I copied all files from the CDs to my WinXP FTP server. Entered the network information necessary, and Linux happily zipped through the first and second installation CDs last night, reading everything over the network from the FTP server. It wound up stopping sometime after I went to sleep, because I hadn't finished downloading, burning, and loading the third CD of installation RPM files. Told it not to continue, and it politely went back to the package selection screen. Tonight, I'll burn and load CD #3 to the FTP server, press "Next" on the installation screen, and it should pick up right where it left off , once the files are available.
My goal is to use an open source BIOS flash program to reliably extract the 003.ABAZ BIOS code flashed in by Wintergreen (the refurb agent for TigerDirect.) Then, I can attempt to flash the P04 and P05 BIOS code from DOS and/or Win98SE. Others have warned that the P04 BIOS may not enable USB boot support, but using an IDE CD-ROM drive works around that problem. The P04 BIOS should enable installation of the FC-PGA (flip-chip) Celeron 800E MHz chip. The 003.ABAZ BIOS doesn't recognize it as an 800 MHz chip (8X multipler, 100 MHz front-side bus), but rather as 533 MHZ (8X multiplier, 66 MHz FSB). I'm hoping that the P05 BIOS allows the 1 GHz and higher Celerons to run in the dot.station, as reported by some of the Spanish hackers with their 'aolitos'.
More information as it continues . . .
