Panasonic CF-M32 install

[Havoc Pennington <rhp@zirx.pair.com>]

Hi,

I just got one of these; it's a cute little subnotebook. Naturally I want
to put Debian on it.

Problem is that the 2.1 rescue disk doesn't quite work. The boot screen
comes up, I press return, it loads the kernel off the disk; then when I'd
normally expect the kernel messages to start scrolling by, it
spontaneously reboots.

I found notes from one guy on the internet saying that he got Red Hat 5.2
onto this thing, so in principle it should probably work.

 - anyone done this? what were the magic boot parameters?
 - how can I try to figure out which hardware is confusing it?
 - how hard is it to create a rescue disk with a different kernel, 
   maybe a newer kernel would work better?
 - other suggestions?

Thanks,
Havoc