Aww shucks MsMittens, now you've made me feel bad, you're like the sober yin to my fiery yang ;-)
I had /similar/ problems with a friends mandrake install - it steadfastly refused to install gcc, and an app he wanted didn't have an RPM, in the end i gave up and stuck red hat 6.2 on, which was fine when i gave it the critical security updates.
Anyways evilseed, why not stick with debian -
apt-get install kernel-image-2.2.13 (or whatever)
apt-get install kernel-headers-2.2.13
ln -s /usr/src/kernel-headers-2.2.13 /usr/src/linux