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If you install ttylinux by hand, not using the bootable CD-ROM, what you get is a 8 MB ext2 filesystem image that contains only the distribution files. You will need to add a Linux kernel to this to make a complete system.
The kernel you use will obviously need to support all the hardware you want to use, plus some additional requirements for ttylinux itself. The kernel used for running ttylinux needs to have ramdisk support, initial ramdisk support, and a default ramdisk size of at least 8192. Note that the stock kernel configuration will use a ramdisk size of 4096, which is not enough. If you want to use the basic firewall script of ttylinux, your kernel also needs iptables support.
If you want to use the telnet server in ttylinux, your kernel will need to have Unix98 pseudo terminal support and support for the devpts filesystem.
ttylinux is basically designed to work with any kernel from 2.4.4 upwards. You might be able to run the system with a 2.2.x kernel, but this is neither officially supported nor tested. The ttylinux firewall script definitiely won't work with a 2.2.x kernel.
The Linux kernel on the system that is used to install ttylinux needs to have support for the ext2 filesystem and loopback device. If there is no loopback support, you cannot customize ttylinux for your system. No problem if the defaults suit you perfectly, but that is rather unlikely.
For the default installation process describes below, it is also required that the system used to install ttylinux is based on glibc, also known as libc6. The customization process requires you to run a program from ttylinux at one point that is linked against glibc.
This may all sound like a lot of requirements for the preparation system, but almost any half-recent Linux distribution with its default kernel will do.