On Tue, 6 Sep 2016, Chris Muller wrote:

> Hi all, one of my workmates (who is a Smalltalk veteran) just asked me
> how to run a Spur image I had given him.  That this question needs to
> be asked by someone like him should tell us something about our
> current VM accessibility, but the fact I was unable to give him a
> straight answer, even moreso.
>
> Shouldn't it be obvious enough even for newbies, but there are so many
> plausible answers to this question which are simply incorrect:
>
>    - squeakvm.org is only for old interpreter VM; totally misleading
> to a newbie.
>
>    - It *does* have a reference to the "Unofficial and experimental
> "Cog" virtual machines" which leads new users to:
>
>        http://www.mirandabanda.org/files/Cog/VM/
>
>         whereupon we have "lattest" and "stable".  Great!
>
>    - Not great, because those are actually old too.  So squeakvm.org
> is just a wild-goose chase, ha ha sorry newbie..     :(
>
>    - Sigh, okay, so what about squeak.org --> Downloads?  Surely
> there's a recent VM there?
>
>     Well, selecting the Linux (x86) link lets me download
> Squeak5.1-16548-32bit-201608171728-Linux.zip.  However, this file
> organizes the VM in a totally non-standard way (everything under /bin,
> no /lib directory), so I didn't want to point him to that one, because
> we have existing scripts which assume the legacy organization and I
> don't want to wrestle with installation / configuration issues.
>
>    - SO, I was about to let him him in on the github whipper-snapper
> secret that only a few, In-The-Know Squeak Elites know about, myself,
> learned only a couple of days ago!
>
>        https://bintray.com/opensmalltalk/vm/cog/#files
>
> but its this massive jumbled list of a hundred or more tar files.  I
> can sort them by name, and *I* can find the right VM tarball for
> myself, but how to tell someone else?   Searching that web page for
> "linux32x86_squeak.cog.spur" will find just 12, from which I can
> select one of the many generated all in the same day?  So is there
> still a "stable" version?
>
> Whew!  So,
>
>    1) what is the best answer for my workmate, and

http://squeak.org/downloads/

>    2) how can we make this easier?

Perhaps a wizard-like thing on the website could help.

Levente

>
> Thanks.
>
>