Win32 VM Update & Request for help

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Thu Aug 30 05:45:21 UTC 2007


Hi Folks -

I've done two interesting improvements to the Win32 VM mostly for 
production uses. First, fetch the latest Windows VM from:

   http://squeakvm.org/win32/release/SqueakVM-Win32-3.10.5-bin.zip

and run it. Aaaahhhh! What a nice splash screen ;-) The reason for the 
(optional) splash screen is that I finally got beaten into delaying the 
main window creation up until the point when there is something to show 
but unfortunately this also leads to the problem that if the time to 
show something interesting is a couple of seconds there is no 
user-visible feedback about the application launch, so the splash screen 
support became necessary (shame on the Mac VM for delaying window 
creation without splash screen! ;-)

Of course, not being the artist myself, I'd appreciate a nicer looking 
splash screen by someone a little more artistically inclined, and that 
could mean fame and ... err ... fame for you!

(see also http://squeakvm.org/win32/settings.html for the updated 
documentation on the splash screen settings)

The other relevant production improvement in this VM are a few new 
system attributes which report very detailed information about the 
current platform:

* Smalltalk getSystemAttribute: 10001
Reports detailed hardware information, for example:

Hardware information:
	Manufacturer: Panasonic
	Model: R5
	Number of processors: 1
	Page size: 4096

Memory Information (upon launch):
	Physical Memory Size: 1038384 kbytes
	Physical Memory Free: 330896 kbytes
	Page File Size: 1987776 kbytes
	Page File Free: 1332884 kbytes
	Virtual Memory Size: 2097024 kbytes
	Virtual Memory Free: 1931968 kbytes
	Memory Load: 68 percent

Processor 0: Genuine Intel(R) CPU           U1400  @ 1.20GHz
	Identifier: x86 Family 6 Model 14 Stepping 8
	~MHZ: 1197

* Smalltalk getSystemAttribute: 10002
Reports detailed OS information, for example:

Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP (Build 2600 Service Pack 2)
	Registered Owner:
	Registered Company:
	SP major version: 2
	SP minor version: 0
	Suite mask: 100
	Product type: 1

* Smalltalk getSystemAttribute: 10003
Reports detailed Graphics information, for example:

Display Information:
	Graphics adapter name: Mobile Intel(R) 945GM/GU Express Chipset Family
	Primary monitor resolution: 1024 x 768

Device: Mobile Intel(R) 945GM/GU Express Chipset Family
	Adapter String: Mobile Intel(R) 945GM/GU Express Chipset Family
	Bios String: Intel Video BIOS
	Chip Type: Intel(R) GMA 950
	DAC Type: Internal
	Memory Size: 0x08000000

Driver Versions:
	igxprd32: 6.14.10.4785

All of the above can be extremely helpful if you need to find out about 
a problem and, perhaps most importantly, the information is also written 
in crash.dmp if the Squeak VM ever crashes. This information has allowed 
us to successfully debug a few problems that would be otherwise very 
hard to find.

As usual, the sources for this version are up on squeakvm.org as well:

   http://squeakvm.org/win32/release/SqueakVM-Win32-3.10.5-bin.zip

Enjoy,
   - Andreas



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