First of all, are you there's no CD drive? It's supposed to be on the right side - if not, you'd see a hole where the drive was.
As for getting this thing to boot. The way I usually get this kind of computer to boot is by putting files externally on the HDD, and booting off of that, no reliance on floppies or CDs.
You have two options for this:
1) Get a USB to IDE caddy, and plug in the HDD into it.
2) Get a CF card and a CF to IDE adapter. This lets you use a CD memory card as a HDD. This will often make it boot faster, and be more quiet. (Unless you have nostalgia attached to the clicking HDD noise. ) This also make it easy to read the card with a standard memory card reader for transferring files in and out.
From there, there are few details but you need to for example attach the drive to a virtual machine, or image it somehow to the same effect. Then boot a DOS boot disk and do a command like "sys a:". Copy the install.exe and the win98 folder from the Win98 CD to the CF card. With any luck, it should now be possible to insert the CF card, through the HDD adapter, to the laptop and boot it. Now you should be able to type install to start the installation.
There are some details I'm glossing over, and I would love to try to help you get it running.