rkiesling at mainmatter.com wrote:

> 
> This seemed as good an opportunity to de-lurk as any.
> 
> Squeak 3.0 built without a hitch on Debian/GNU 2.2, kernel version
> 2.0.38, glibc 2.1.3, and GCC 2.95.2. 

It _will_ build on SuSE (see, I subtly changed the header!) But you do
need to know which kernel sources to have (and, I guess that you need to
know that you do need the kernel sources). This wasn't obvious to me,
and I guess it'd be even less obvious to someone who'd not spent the
last 4 years playing about with Linux.

The point I'd make is that anyone who had downloaded the binary version
and got it running and then discovered that they needed a plug in would
find themselves in the same position. Plugins are probably necessary as
seperate .so files at an ad hoc development level, but I'd argue that
there ought to be a way to make the building of them easier (perhaps a
Squeak equivalent of gimptool?) and to make them loadable from within
Squeak (which, I think, is what the VMMaker folk are talking about in
the plugin suffixes thread). I think the need for this will become more
obvious as Linux (I think inevitably -- look at Mac and Linux use
figures for -- say -- Germany or China) eventually replaces Mac as the
de-facto development platform for Squeak. This isn't a dig against Mac
folk who have taught us so much and have quite enough to contend with.
;-)

I'd welcome a day when all a Linux/Squeak newbie has to know is a 10
word vocabulary of commands to get a plug in built and running. It seems
to me "wrong" that to use a Smalltalk one needs a fair knowledge of C
and a good understanding of relatively arcane Unix stuff. (Of course,
it's nice to have the openess that that introduces available, but I'd
guess that relatively few people would use it from choice or even need
it. I mean, how many people on the list actually write or maintain plug
ins?

nel frattempo, la lotta continua!

Cheers

John


-- 
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Marx: "Why do Anarchists only drink herbal tea?"
Proudhon: "Because all proper tea is theft."
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