Hi,
For those who misunderstood my mail, tftp and bootp (basically PXE) worked before and the kernel and the initramdisk got loaded. The problam was with the installer not being able to access the mirrors. Apparently even though the installer asked me to provide a name server, it did not use it :-(.Wow. How did your network work before? (Hint: dnsmask is nice)
:-)The solution to the mystery is simple: I used a separate subnet and only the DHCP server for this subnet was missing this option. Anyways, the installer asked me for the domain name server (as it should when it does not get the information automatically), but then ignored it! Also, when I configured the network manually, it did not work.
Why use PXE? Well, I always wanted to do that. Also I have the nice little box for the Alix, and it becomes quite cumbersome if you have to unscrew everything, remove the CF card, install everything, then put it back. I am much in favor of automating things, and apparently so is Debian, why else would there be such handy features like preseeding (I'm still learning about it...)?Anyways, the installation seemed to complete successfully. Unfortunately Grub is not yet configured to use the serial console and crashes. Now I need to find a way to mount the partition in a recovery environment in order to change the Grub configuration...Boot the installer again, get into a shell. Mount and chroot. Note that you may need to progress in the installer up to the partitioning stage ot make sure all the drivers are loaded.
Thanks. I tried that and just in case others are in the same situation:I needed to manually modprobe ext2 to mount the partition. Before chrooting into the partition, make sure you remount /proc and /dev.
I found a much easier solution: boot the kernel and the initrd from the network! :-) (the system previously finished installing)
Thanks for all the help! Cheers, Urs