ok I was able to mount to my harddrive with

mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/hda2

I DL'ed a copy of the RPM and am now running

alien -i packagename.rpm


we'll see if this works

UPDATE

I got this message when I ran the above command

alien -i kernel-source-2.4.20-8.i386.rpm
dpkg: unable to access dpkg status area: Read-only file system


what should the properties of the .rpm file be?

right now it is rw-r-r