How to install squeak in school network setting

Christian Mascher christian.mascher at gmx.de
Sat Sep 11 11:56:27 UTC 2004


Dear squeakers,

I'm quite new to smalltalk/squeak myself but think smalltalk is an 
attractive tool for introducing some core OOP-concepts to high-school 
students.

Now I am wondering how I should go about installing the software in our 
network setting, where we have a class of windows client computers 
connected to a Linux (Samba) server.

For a first look at smalltalk I put the VM (windows.exe), sources, image 
and changes file on a server directory (Linux-Samba-share), where it can 
be started by everybody allright. This directory is (of course ?) not 
publically writeable, so no changes can be saved (and squeak starts with 
a notice complaining about that...). Still, for some first experiments 
with message sends etc. this is usable.

Later on, students will want to save their changes. What are my options?

Putting the four files locally in a directory on every windows client 
computer seems natural, but would not work, because the local drives are 
write-protected, too. (At least after rebooting the old setup is 
restored.) We instruct the students to save their private data into 
their private home-directory on the server because of this.

Putting all four files into every individual students home-directory 
would obviously work, but then I would have to give them much more disk 
space, which I feel should not be necessary, as the bulk of the image 
and the .exe-file are the same for everybody.

I would like to find a way, where saving remains a simple task, and 
where possibly only the individual changes of the students have to be 
saved in their home-directory.

Any helpful ideas are greatly appreciated,

Christian Mascher





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