Hi Squeakers,

I'm attempting to build a headless vm for installation on a Linux web 
server. This machine is command-line only - no X Windows installed - so 
the standard precompiled distribution doesn't work. Therefore I've tried 
to build from scratch using this procedure:

1. Download the 3.2-3 release from Ian Piumarta's site.

2. Fire up a 3.2gamma-4881 image on my Mac OS X box and use VMMakerTool 
to generate unix vm sources.

3. Copy the resulting source tree to the Linux server.

4. Create a bld directory as suggested in the README

5. run ../platforms/unix/config/configure --without-x

6. Hack the resulting Makefiles to add the -DHEADLESS flag to DEFS.

7. make

Compilation of sqXWindows.c fails because of numerous syntax errors, 
which seem to be related to certain declarations being skipped because 
HEADLESS was defined.

I also tried the sources from the SourceForge CVS repository, but that 
didn't work either. Compilation went OK aside from some minor glitches, 
but linking failed because hundreds of symbols were undefined. It looks 
like they might by named primitives, but I lack the Squeak-Fu to be able 
to tell.

Some questions for the VM gurus out there:

1. Is this a reasonable thing to be attempting to do? The presence of 
--without-x in the configure script and #ifdef HEADLESS in the sources 
suggest that it is, but I suspect that in practice very few people 
actually use these options, so they might not be properly maintained.

2. Is there some magic ingredient that I'm missing somewhere? Some 
switch, flag or button that needs to be pushed?

3. The SF sources seemed to be a bit happier with -HEADLESS than Ian's 
release. Is there some stable tag that I can check out of the CVS 
repository? The downloads page only seem to have Windows releases and 
HEAD seems to be 3.3alpha, which is a little too bleeding edge for 
deployment.

If there's a HOWTO on this somewhere, I'll be happy to RTFM.

Thanks,

Colin

Colin Putney
Whistler.com