root_fs_i386.ext2.gz is a 250M uClibc-based ext2 filesystem.
Uncompress and use a loop device to mount it somewhere.
-- it is recommended that you do this in a Linux hard drive partition.

The other tarballs in this folder are source packages used in the
uClibc filesystem.

This is used to create the initial ramdisk file 'initrd.gz' in Puppy2.