whatever happened to the Alt+F2 installer shell?

[Thomas M Steenholdt]

Hi...

I'm having some problems installing using current rawhide boot.iso under 
VMware. It *seems like* there could be a regression in the pcnet32 
driver or something, because it looks like the NIC is found but the 
network is down. However I cannot really look into the problem, because 
the Alt+F2 shell, that I would normally consult first to figure out what 
is going on, is blank/empty.
Is this on purpose? I tried to search through this list, but cannot find 
anything.

Anyone?

/Thomas