[ANN] Object Oriented Christmas (Squeak PC)

Ned Konz ned at squeakland.org
Mon Dec 15 03:24:43 UTC 2003


On Sunday 14 December 2003 5:03 pm, Mark Mayfield wrote:

> questions:
> >The Squeak PC is shipped with a 96M flash installed
> >which includes 1) A compact Linux 2.4 boot system, 2) A full Squeak 3.6
> >(plus OSProcess and Games) with Linux VM, and 3) about 60MB of free space
> >(!).
>
> 1) It's Linux. So how much Linux will I need to know just to run Squeak?
> I'm mainly concerned about using USB memory sticks, peripherals, powering
> off the system, etc. What can I say...I'm a Mac user.

Don't worry; most of what you'd need to know would look the same as it would in a Mac terminal session.
I believe that the file system isn't compressed, so if you edit a file on the CF it'll just stay there.

As far as using USB memory sticks, you should be able to set the system up for auto-mounting;
if you're just using Squeak, you could use OSProcess to do mounting and unmounting
(or you could set it up so that hotplug would auto-mount).

The way I use the USB memory sticks in Linux is mostly this: I add a line to my /etc/fstab

# pen drive
/dev/scsi/host1/bus0/target0/lun0/part1         /pen    vfat    user,noauto     0       0

and then just say
	mount /pen
and
	umount /pen

> 2) Will there be a way to restore (from some kind of backup) the initial
> flash configuration so that the system can be restored to its pristine
> condition?

Sure, why not?
Plug the flash into your Mac (using a PCMCIA/CF adapter if necessary),
and use dd to copy the contents of the block device to a file. Reverse to get the flash back.

	<eject the disk from the Finder>

	su
	dd if=/dev/disk1 of=TheFlashStuff

> I too am just about to buy one after the holidays. It sounds too cool to
> pass up.

Absolutely!

I'm sure that as people work with these more there'll be handy tricks available on the Swiki.



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list