-----Original Message----- From: David T. Lewis [mailto:lewis@mail.msen.com] Sent: Saturday, April 01, 2000 3:21 PM To: squeak@cs.uiuc.edu Subject: Headless Unix startup (was: VM bugs and make problems)
On Sat, Apr 01, 2000 at 10:49:45AM -0500, dpennell@quallaby.com wrote:
Has anybody looked at how hard it would be to update the Unix VM to run headless via a command line switch like the Windows VM does?
-david
The headless VM has all the X stuff ifdeffed out. That keeps the irrelevant crud out of the headless VM. Among other things, I expect that this permits cleaner polling for external events, which could be important for headless applications.
If you have OSProcess loaded, you can do 'UnixProcess decapitate' to close the UI on a running Squeak, or you can do 'UnixProcess forkHeadlessSqueakAndDo: [something]' to start a new headless image. In either case, you're still running the normal VM (including all the X code), but it makes for an easy way to start a headless image without using a separately compiled VM.
Cool !
I suppose it would be easy to add a command line flag to force headless operation from the Unix command line using the normal VM. What's the command line flag for this in the Windows and Mac VMs? I'll can hack it into the next OSProcess release if there's interest.
On Windows its "-headless". An icon shows up in the system tray. You can click on it and get a live window. Count me as interested.
Thanks, -david