Network installation woes

[Jon Becker <becker@CS.Stanford.EDU>]

I'm a newbie, trying to install Debian for the first time.  I can boot
from the 2.2r2 install CD, but I get a kernel panic when dbootstrap
tries to do the network configuration.

Okay, so I skip the network configuration, set everything else up, and
on reboot from the hard disk, I get another kernel panic w/ register
dump, just after the line, "Configuring network interfaces."

Help!  What can I do to track this down?  What can cause a kernel panic
in this situation?  The machine's 100MB ethernet has worked fine under
MacOS.  This is a 400MHz uniprocessor G4.

-Jon