I recently tried to answer a query on the Pi forum about getting Squeak images on a Pi/Raspbian. It was a lot more involved than I’d hoped and I really think we could do more to make life easier.
The query and my answer are at - http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=80556 and I would be interested in better answers. One important issue is that the current Scratch system installed by default in Raspbian requires a plain interpreter VM since it is an old format image that cannot run on the newer StackVM that supports the improved Scratch I’m developing for the Pi foundation. So, simply replacing the vm is not ok, we would need to have both in order to get the best from a 4.5 image.
Extra confusion is caused (for me) by the assorted scripts that get involved; there is a ‘squeak’ shell script somewhere that does all sorts of stuff including opening a dialogue that is supposed to help you find an image to run but seemingly does nothing actually useful. There’s also a ‘scratch’ shell script that does other odd stuff.
This is a problem very likely to be faced by a lot of newcomers stumbling across Squeak on their Pi’s. Anything we can do to make it *really* easy for people to try Squeak could pay off in a lot of interested new users.
tim -- tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim People who deal with bits should expect to get bitten.
Hi Tim,
being an absolute Linux noob, I found my experience very smooth.
I discovered a folder /home/pi/squeak and there I threw image changes and sources via sftp. Everything worked. I have 3.8, 4.4 and 4.5 images by now and the dialogue does what it is advertised for.
What I did (because of the weird things I do) was limit Squeak memory to 384M in the shell script squeak in /usr/bin/. On my Linux virtual server I got throtteled because Squeak creates tons of IO if it can use the whole memory. Different Story.
For beginners this is not needed, just create a nice zip with (old format) image, changes and sources and unpack it to /home/pi.
I know it's bad to ask others to do work but wouldn't it be a nice idea to find a RasPi link on the website with a short howto?
Cheers, ducking
Herbert
Am 02.07.2014 18:51, schrieb tim Rowledge:
I recently tried to answer a query on the Pi forum about getting Squeak images on a Pi/Raspbian. It was a lot more involved than I’d hoped and I really think we could do more to make life easier.
The query and my answer are at - http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=80556 and I would be interested in better answers. One important issue is that the current Scratch system installed by default in Raspbian requires a plain interpreter VM since it is an old format image that cannot run on the newer StackVM that supports the improved Scratch I’m developing for the Pi foundation. So, simply replacing the vm is not ok, we would need to have both in order to get the best from a 4.5 image.
Extra confusion is caused (for me) by the assorted scripts that get involved; there is a ‘squeak’ shell script somewhere that does all sorts of stuff including opening a dialogue that is supposed to help you find an image to run but seemingly does nothing actually useful. There’s also a ‘scratch’ shell script that does other odd stuff.
This is a problem very likely to be faced by a lot of newcomers stumbling across Squeak on their Pi’s. Anything we can do to make it *really* easy for people to try Squeak could pay off in a lot of interested new users.
tim
tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim People who deal with bits should expect to get bitten.
Oh and reading your longish reply, right clicking on Squeak in the menu gives "Add to Desktop" for your nice Desktop Icon.
- Herbert Am 02.07.2014 19:30, schrieb Herbert König:
Hi Tim,
being an absolute Linux noob, I found my experience very smooth.
I discovered a folder /home/pi/squeak and there I threw image changes and sources via sftp. Everything worked. I have 3.8, 4.4 and 4.5 images by now and the dialogue does what it is advertised for.
What I did (because of the weird things I do) was limit Squeak memory to 384M in the shell script squeak in /usr/bin/. On my Linux virtual server I got throtteled because Squeak creates tons of IO if it can use the whole memory. Different Story.
For beginners this is not needed, just create a nice zip with (old format) image, changes and sources and unpack it to /home/pi.
I know it's bad to ask others to do work but wouldn't it be a nice idea to find a RasPi link on the website with a short howto?
Cheers, ducking
Herbert
Am 02.07.2014 18:51, schrieb tim Rowledge:
I recently tried to answer a query on the Pi forum about getting Squeak images on a Pi/Raspbian. It was a lot more involved than I’d hoped and I really think we could do more to make life easier.
The query and my answer are at - http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=80556 and I would be interested in better answers. One important issue is that the current Scratch system installed by default in Raspbian requires a plain interpreter VM since it is an old format image that cannot run on the newer StackVM that supports the improved Scratch I’m developing for the Pi foundation. So, simply replacing the vm is not ok, we would need to have both in order to get the best from a 4.5 image.
Extra confusion is caused (for me) by the assorted scripts that get involved; there is a ‘squeak’ shell script somewhere that does all sorts of stuff including opening a dialogue that is supposed to help you find an image to run but seemingly does nothing actually useful. There’s also a ‘scratch’ shell script that does other odd stuff.
This is a problem very likely to be faced by a lot of newcomers stumbling across Squeak on their Pi’s. Anything we can do to make it *really* easy for people to try Squeak could pay off in a lot of interested new users.
tim
tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim People who deal with bits should expect to get bitten.
On 02-07-2014, at 10:30 AM, Herbert König herbertkoenig@gmx.net wrote:
Hi Tim,
being an absolute Linux noob, I found my experience very smooth.
Glad to hear it; I hoped there was as simpler way. Even though I’ve used *nix of many sorts for decades I still find it almost completely incomprehensible, totally infuriating and generally Just Plain ‘Orrible.
I discovered a folder /home/pi/squeak and there I threw image changes and sources via sftp. Everything worked. I have 3.8, 4.4 and 4.5 images by now and the dialogue does what it is advertised for.
That is excellent news. So much simpler!
What I did (because of the weird things I do) was limit Squeak memory to 384M in the shell script squeak in /usr/bin/. On my Linux virtual server I got throtteled because Squeak creates tons of IO if it can use the whole memory. Different Story.
For beginners this is not needed, just create a nice zip with (old format) image, changes and sources and unpack it to /home/pi.
I know it's bad to ask others to do work but wouldn't it be a nice idea to find a RasPi link on the website with a short howto?
Yes, it would be a help. Right now the only easy to point to download is for the all-in-one which then means much joy to extract the right parts. I suppose we might be able to insert a suitable script to extract the image/changes/sources to the proper Pi places. At least that would be easy to explain.
tim -- tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Useful Latin Phrases:- Tam exanimis quam tunica nehru fio. = I am as dead as the nehru jacket.
On 02-07-2014, at 11:15 AM, tim Rowledge tim@rowledge.org wrote:
On 02-07-2014, at 10:30 AM, Herbert König herbertkoenig@gmx.net wrote:
Hi Tim,
being an absolute Linux noob, I found my experience very smooth.
Glad to hear it; I hoped there was as simpler way. Even though I’ve used *nix of many sorts for decades I still find it almost completely incomprehensible, totally infuriating and generally Just Plain ‘Orrible.
I discovered a folder /home/pi/squeak and there I threw image changes and sources via sftp. Everything worked. I have 3.8, 4.4 and 4.5 images by now and the dialogue does what it is advertised for.
That is excellent news. So much simpler!
One slight oddity is that there is a strange looking (to me) symbolic link already in /home/pi/squeak that probably means the sources file should go at the end of it; I’ve never seen a symbolic link names ‘*.sources’ or anything like that before.
I tried starting squeak from the ‘start’ menu (oh, how unpleasantly like Windows that is) and it simply started up my one image, so I imagine the script only offers choices if you have several findable image files.
tim -- tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Ornerythologists study bad tempered birds
Am 02.07.2014 20:43, schrieb tim Rowledge:
One slight oddity is that there is a strange looking (to me) symbolic link already in /home/pi/squeak that probably means the sources file should go at the end of it; I’ve never seen a symbolic link names ‘*.sources’ or anything like that before.
I thought so myself but then where is the end of a symbolic link and how does it differ from a link in Windows?
No need to explain, I could google :-) It worked so I didn't touch it and in windows I also just throw everything into one folder, including the VM.
No surprises by well meaning automatisms starting the right VM with the wrong image and such.
Setting up a headless Squeak from the all in one on my hosted Ubuntu server is something I'll try not to repeat. Shell scripts calling shell scripts mixed with not used shell scripts strongly reminds me of C headers and includes. My admiration goes to those who set that up.
Cheers,
Herbert
The query and my answer are at - http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=80556 and I would be interested in better answers.
I don't have better answers, only more questions and ideas, which I am sorry about since one questioner on the forum must mean there are 10 or 100 others who already gave up, and more who find Squeak on their machine each week. I am delighted that Herbert found it straightforward.
On the RPi, does the Cog StackVM give measurably better performance than the interpreter VM we all know and love? (I run Squeak 4.5 on the interpreter VM but my PC is a lot faster than a Pi.)
Does your new Scratch image take ideas from Phratch http://www.phratch.com/ , or indeed BYOB http://byob.berkeley.edu/ or other Scratch forks, or is it entirely independent?
It would be great if more of us developed some packaging skill, with a view to providing a path to upstream Raspbian and Debian adopting cleaned up packages. Sadly Linux packaging is not a skill I have yet.
I too have dug through the scripts and found them confusing. The startup script that Bert wrote for Linux is in the Etoys distribution at squeakland.org : I am a big fan of that as it seems to find everything effectively (plugins drivers and of course the image) and start up cleanly. I don't know if it is in any squeak.org downloads, but I am pretty sure that official Debian and Fedora packages use older and arguably slightly flaky or harder to use scripts (except for Sugar, but that is wrapped in some Python goodness that Bert cooked up.)
To get everyone else thinking, I wrote one sketch of an approach, if we find the right volunteers: * Distribute zipped images the way Herbert suggested (and via the RPi website if you have the contacts.) * cleanup or expand the launch script so it launches Scratch, new Scratch and Squeak 4.5 (if it doesn't already) * prototype a suite of deb packages for Raspbian * when the prototypes are building cleanly, consider a public release * use them as a template to work with the Debian package mainainers * start prototyping a move to one of the Cog VMs (I don't know the relative merits of Stack, JIT or Spur) * ...
Even though I don't own an RPi, I am sure I can emulate one on Qemu, and I would love to help if we can get a small project together to tackle this in bite-sized or nibble-sized chunks.
David.
Hi David,
I got a ready to use Qemu plus image for the Pi and under Windows it's slower than an actual Pi and can't do Network.
Get a Pi instead of grey hair :-))
IMHO that is maybe I just got a suboptimal version.
Cheers,
Herbert Am 02.07.2014 19:37, schrieb David Corking:
The query and my answer are at - http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=80556 and I would be interested in better answers.
I don't have better answers, only more questions and ideas, which I am sorry about since one questioner on the forum must mean there are 10 or 100 others who already gave up, and more who find Squeak on their machine each week. I am delighted that Herbert found it straightforward.
On the RPi, does the Cog StackVM give measurably better performance than the interpreter VM we all know and love? (I run Squeak 4.5 on the interpreter VM but my PC is a lot faster than a Pi.)
Does your new Scratch image take ideas from Phratch http://www.phratch.com/ , or indeed BYOB http://byob.berkeley.edu/ or other Scratch forks, or is it entirely independent?
It would be great if more of us developed some packaging skill, with a view to providing a path to upstream Raspbian and Debian adopting cleaned up packages. Sadly Linux packaging is not a skill I have yet.
I too have dug through the scripts and found them confusing. The startup script that Bert wrote for Linux is in the Etoys distribution at squeakland.org : I am a big fan of that as it seems to find everything effectively (plugins drivers and of course the image) and start up cleanly. I don't know if it is in any squeak.org downloads, but I am pretty sure that official Debian and Fedora packages use older and arguably slightly flaky or harder to use scripts (except for Sugar, but that is wrapped in some Python goodness that Bert cooked up.)
To get everyone else thinking, I wrote one sketch of an approach, if we find the right volunteers:
- Distribute zipped images the way Herbert suggested (and via the RPi
website if you have the contacts.)
- cleanup or expand the launch script so it launches Scratch, new
Scratch and Squeak 4.5 (if it doesn't already)
- prototype a suite of deb packages for Raspbian
- when the prototypes are building cleanly, consider a public release
- use them as a template to work with the Debian package mainainers
- start prototyping a move to one of the Cog VMs (I don't know the
relative merits of Stack, JIT or Spur)
- ...
Even though I don't own an RPi, I am sure I can emulate one on Qemu, and I would love to help if we can get a small project together to tackle this in bite-sized or nibble-sized chunks.
David.
Herbert wrote: 'Get a Pi instead of grey hair :-));'
Thanks for the tip! (Don't have enough hair left to go grey)
Also, I was not keeping up with the Phratch news. It seems they already have zip distributions for Linux.
http://www.phratch.com/phratch/phratchinstall
David.
squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org
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David Corking -
Herbert König -
tim Rowledge