On Friday 18 May 2018 05:55 AM, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> We had something almost like this for the OLPC Etoys release. The image 
> was installed in /usr/local/share which is not writable by the user. 
> Saving defaulted to a user directory. The VM startup script would check 
> if there was an image in the user directory. If so it would run that, 
> otherwise the system image.

+1. Images could be saved in $XDG_DESKTOP_DIR/squeak/. NetMorph 
generated a small random (readable) name for saving which also works out 
well. This is simple enough for beginners but could be overridden by 
advanced Squeakers.

These days, most beginners prefer to open their files rather than start 
an app and then open the file within the app.

> Something similar could work for Squeak. The main problem would be to 
> have a VM mechanism for selecting an image you want to run on startup.
I would rather not reinvent the wheel and bloat the vm. xdg[1] already 
does most of the job for common desktops like GNOME/KDE etc. We could 
use xdg-utils[2] commands to pick up settings at launch time and use 
xdg-open to launch images. There is a one-time pain in generating 
mimetypes[3] for every image variant and the corresponding *.desktop 
spec for various vms (stack/cog/spur etc).

[1] 
https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html
[2] https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/xdg-utils/
[3] https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec/

Regards .. Subbu