langue originale : français
dernière mise-à-jour: 09/09/2001

DemoLinux 3.0

Welcome to DemoLinux 3.0.

Among various other improvements, version 3.0 now introduces the Xvesa X server, remplacing the framebuffer used before, which depended on VESA 2.0 cards. We now handle PCI sound cards, Lucent winmodems, Reiserfs version 3.5.x, certain USB peripherals and several other 2.2.18 kernel devices. As for version 2.0, DemoLinux 3 heavily uses a transparent compression schema that allows to sotre over a gigabyte of applications, including GNOME and KDE and the StarOffice office suite. The compression code has been fixed and now it is faster and more reliable. The list of installed packages is here. Notice this time we included highly demanded tools like ssh (which is downloaded on the fly and not pre-installed, due to legal reasons), gpart, dump etc, as well as a version of TeXmacs.

Install Linux in 3 clics !

You can now try to install DemoLinux 3 on your hard disk.
Be sure you have an empty hard disk (or disk partition) at hand, and click on the install icon on the root desktop.
You will get a basic Linux installation, almost identical to the one you would get after a regular Debian install (but on one single partition, with a swap file instead of a swap partition, and a floppy based boot). All configuration done by DemoLinux should be still present after the install, so you should have nothing to do. To configue additional peripherals, just use the usual tools of the Debian distribution.

Notice, though, that very few people tested this functionality, so we only recommend it to experts, for the time being.

Known Bugs

If you know how to fix one of the following problems, please tell us!

  • serial mouse does not work when using the 1024vesa/800vesa/640vesa modes: early versions of DemoLinux 3.0 used a version of Xvesa that only understood PS2 protocols. This problem is solved in 3.01 and later, which use a more recent Xvesa that perfectly handles serial mice (many thanx to Keith Packard and Juliusz Chroboczek for their excellent work!)

  • DemoLinux 3.0 patches the kernel to add a boot splash screen (this is not LPP, which seems to depend on VESA 2.0 compliant cards). Unfortunately, we came across at least one machine with a broken bios (a version of the HP OmniBook XE2) that has bad interactions with the patch. Your help is welcome in adding a "nologo" kernel command line option to disable at run time the splash screen patch. Meanwhile, download the alternative boot floppy images from the ftp site.

  • Booting from inside Windows only works if the CD-Rom reader is properly configured under DOS (not gonna happen that often). The simple workaraound (adopted by Mandrake, for example) would be to copy on the Windows hard disk the files needed to boot, but that violates DemoLinux's motto: "don't touch the disk". Has anybouady a loadlin for Windows ?

  • ...
Non supported (or badly detected) hardware

Constructive input on the following problems is very welcome

  • The necessary tools for using ADSL modems (pppoe and pptp) are installed with their documentation. But we do not provide automatic install scripts. If you want to submit a tested and working script for DemoLinux, you are very welcome to do it.
  • ...
You can install all other peripherals using the standard tools from the distribution.