I tried to set up my Efike Smartbook such that NIS and autofs is started
when the computer is switched on. However, Rebooting the computer failed.
During booting the Genesi logo is displayed, afterwards the screen is black
and I'm not able to switch to any consol window.

My questions are, then

(1) Is there any key combinations such that the boot process can be stopped
in e.g. level 2?

(2) Can I use a rescue image, and if that's possible, where can I download it?

Hi, you can download installation images at:
http://www.powerdeveloper.org/platforms/efikamx/linux

If you unpack the downloaded file, you will have an image file that needs to be written to an SD card which is at least 2GB in size.

For further instructions on how to do so, please see this page:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Insta ... omImgFiles

Once you successfully wrote the image file to an SD card, please insert the SD card and boot your Efika MX Smarttop which should automatically start our OS installer. You will need to press "Y" (US keyboard layout) to confirm that you would like to reinstall the operating system.

Thank you for the link to the install image. It's a reference to a SmartTop image,
is it valid for a SmartBook also?

In search for a key sequence for stopping the boot process, I have made some progress... Pressing Esc during boot gives, at least, some information about what's going on. As far as I can see, the SmartBook seems to start NIS befor bringing wlan0 up. Then it dies.

After some search for images, I came across a nice collection on a nice
website:

http://steubentech.com/~talon/Efika-MX/

Is it possible to boot from one of these images and then, in some way, access
the internal flash and disable NIS?

The picture is there for illustrative purposes only. The page uses phrases such as "for all EfikaMX models" which refers to smarttops as well as smartbooks.

I figured it out, finally... It may be trivial, but in case someone else who's
not familiar with Efika runs into the same problem, here's a summary of what I
did:

The image from

http://steubentech.com/~talon/Efika-MX/ ... ard.img.xz

was dd'ed to a SD card as described in

http://steubentech.com/~talon/Efika-MX/ ... README.txt

The SmartBook was booted using the SD card, and when up and running: Then edit /tmp/mnt/init.d/nis such that 'exit 0' is the only command in it.

The SmartBook now boots from the internal flash and /etc/init.d/nis was restored
from /etc/init.d/nis.bck and NOT started at any boot-level:
However, both nis and autofs can be started automatically by inserting
two lines in /etc/rc.local:

Thanks for sharing.