Livecd has broken symlinks in /var. I discovered it when trying to run dhcp on my virtio network interface. When I made the directory /run networking worked, then I made /run/lock and /var/spool/mail and things worked normally. Without fixing this the new livecd does not work.
noticed it too on the amd64 2012-10-13 livecd
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 421839 ***