Greetings, Richard.

Re:
>For a while now I have been trying to get Squeak 1.3 to work on various 
>sytems (Windows 96, Linux, Mac). I haven't been able to do anything 
>useful with it yet though. I get it to start, but anything more 
>complicated than 'hello world' like stuff results in errors.. or hangs my 
>system (any of them). Heck, evensimply opening views often fails.

Don't panic.
Although 1.3 does have some bugs (soon to be fixed), they aren't that
serious. I suspect your files may have been corrupted on download.
Another possible problem is insufficient memory.

Try the following:
  a. download and unpack the 1.3 release for the Mac
  b. download and unpack the file SqueakV1.sources
Place all files into the same folder. The critical ones are
the .image file, the .changes file, SqueakV1.sources, and
the virtual machine (i.e., the executable). Reboot your
Mac. Drop the .image file onto the executable. When it
starts up, use the desktop menu "help" and select "space left"
from the submenu. If you have less than a megabyte, quit
and use the Mac "Get Info" command to increase the memory
allocation of the Squeak executable.

I suggest starting the the Mac version only because that
what I've been using myself, so I can vouche for its
stability. However, I believe the Win95 and Linux versions
are equally stable.

If you still have troubles, try going back to version 1.23,
which was really rock-solid. 1.31, which will be out within
the week, should fix a number of gliches with 1.3 and
add some cool new features as well.


Re:
>I can't load any *.st or *.cs files. When I import Newsagent.st or the 
>stuff from the Windows Junta and try to get them to work, it always
>results in 'message not understood' and whatever errors indicating that
>there are commands missing. Trying to fix things by hand usualy leads to
>cascading error messages popping up all over the place... and I am not
>that good in low-level programming in Smalltalk yet to solve them easily.

Squeak does not yet support line-end conversion, although I believe
someone recently posted goodie that does that. Thus, it expects to
see a single <cr> at the end of every line. Thus, when you download
..st or .cs files, you must be sure that the line-ends are not
converted. On the Mac, downloading them as "text" should do the
right thing. Some versions of StuffIt include a utility that can
fix line ends, or you can a few lines of Squeak to do it.

I think you are very close to getting Squeak running. Good luck!

	-- John