[squeak-dev] bare metal Scratch on Pi

Casey Ransberger casey.obrien.r at gmail.com
Thu Jul 18 20:21:49 UTC 2013


This is what I want (for perpendicular reasons...)

Rather than bare metal, I'd prefer to build out a bare bones Linux or BSD system. Basically I want the network stack, the drivers, and the file system. On boot, run the Squeak VM in the framebuffer. 

X11 and its dependencies is an ocean of complexity that I'd like to get rid of. The only reason I haven't tried something like this is: I haven't succeeded in embedding WebKit (now Blink I guess?) in the Squeak VM. 

My motives are a) I'd like to unload most of my operating system ("there shouldn't be one," but "society deposits it's customs on the traveller," so I'll go with the wagon over the Mack truck) and b) it's annoying to have to switch back and forth between UIs all the time.

In general though, I think he's got the right idea wrt hiding some of the complexity for the shorter programmers in our ranks. It would be cool to see where this kind of thinking goes. 

On Jul 18, 2013, at 12:55 PM, "Jecel Assumpcao Jr." <jecel at merlintec.com> wrote:

> Near the end of this rather long interview with Ebon Upton, he mentions
> the idea of having the Raspberry Pi boot directly to the Scratch screen
> for smaller children or the Python prompt for older ones.
> 
> http://tuxradar.com/content/%EF%BB%BFinterview-eben-upton
> 
> His idea of having a minimal Linux hidden out of the way sounds a lot
> like what Dan Ingalls had already done in his weather station PCs. So I
> imagine it is a relatively easy product. If I understood correctly, he
> wants a dual boot system so after a while a child can move on to a
> regular Linux machine (by holding F1 during boot, for example). I
> thought SD cards were now cheap enough that you could have two different
> ones and then just swap them if you want a different system. At least
> this is less abstract (and fitting in with the Pis retro theme, like how
> people used the Alto and its removable disk packs).
> 
> In any case, it might be fun as a second step to go beyond that and have
> a ScratchNOS built on top of the SqueakNOS project. This would only be
> interesting if you could escape Scratch back into the full development
> image, and then it would be important to change the name and disable the
> uploading of projects as required by the Scratch license.
> 
> -- Jecel
> 
> 


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