I'm by no means some linux master but I do know a thing or two. Your going to have to mount the floppy drive in order to get access to the disk and copy the files over that you need. Linux since 7.3 or earlier I believe automatically mounts disks for you. You'll need to go to /mnt/floppy and copy the files to some place you can work with them. If they are rpm's you should be able to install them straight from the disk. If they are .tgz .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 then you'll need to move them to the hard drive and uncompress them. You should be able to follow the instructions on your hardware vendors web site.
 
Hopefully that helps. If you need help with any of the simpler operations of linux you can always check out a good site like http://www.linuxnovice.org/. I felt I was fairly proficient but still had some questions and they cleared those all up pretty quickly.
 
One last thing. You might consider going to a newer version of linux if you can. Redhat 8 and 9 seem to have a made a big jump in the detection and support of hardware. I'm running a fairly new NForce2 based motherboard and Redhat 9 detects and runs everything properly(with the exception of my serial ATA controller, but that's trivial). Good luck!