om, 

I was messing around with Squeek today and notied that Ian's great
Telnet utity had an absolutly fantastic editing window while
CommandShell had a very poor one so I started trying to put them
togeather. I made some progress and went to #squeeek for help.. I
learned that CommandShell's edit window supported a special "pluggable"
interface and hence would require much additional work. =\ Not really
knowing about what this pluggable stuff was I decided to set it asside. 

In that same chat a dude, Quotar, asked me about having squeek serve
telnet when in a headless mode. (or any other mode, presumably. using
CommandShell as the back-end...) 

Once CommandShell is correctly adapted to TerminalWindow setting it up
behind a telnet/terminal/X-term window is no stunt at all... The only
function of the telnetd utility is to set up a connection between the
remote and local hosts. Once login has occoured, things get sent to the
user's prefered shell. This could be squeak....

The major drawback to this approch are severalfold: 

1. Because the current squaek system is single-threaded, it will need to
block and sit on the read(); call or poll it... neither solution is
especially great... 

2. This doesn't account for connecting to already running VMs... I don't
know enough about pe-unix IPC to know wheather it is feasable for a
session shell to connect to a back-end server that is sitting on
standby.... If there is a way it's probably some gawdawful hack. This
means that all instances of squeak started in this manner will be on
completely seperate instances of the VM -- which could be more than a
little problematic. 

What you really want, ofcourse, is to have a multithreaded squeak (I'm
now using my dual athlon as my main machine) so that a thread can be
forked to sit on the console while allowing other processes within the
immage to procede unhindered. 

I'll start working on the VM but can easily forsee that disentangeling
all those variables will take a long time........ =\ 


-- 
Testimonial: I wasted 2,000 hours using Linux.

http://users.rcn.com/alangrimes/