A successful morning

Michael Rueger m.rueger
Fri Apr 18 14:53:46 PDT 2003



Christopher Sawtell wrote:

>   I am thrilled to be able to tell you all that I have just been invited to 
> show off Squeak once a week until Christmas for most of a morning at 
> Discovery 1 Primary School ( 5 to 12-13 year olds ) here in Christchurch, NZ. 

Great news!
Especially as it is Christchurch, I spent two months at the University
there some years ago :-)

>   Thus a few questions.
>   1) I downloaded the browser plugin, but to my disappointment the iMac would
> only run either Squeak or IE, but not both together; so the question is; how
> much installed memory does one need in an iMac for the squeakland system to
> work properly?

64MB, with virtual memory turned on, is a reasonable minimum. The OS
already eats up 20-30MB, Squeak likes to use app the same. As MacOS has
still this stupid static allocation/assignment of memory to applications
you need to balance each application's memory needs. 
Windows does dynamic allocation so you shouldn't run into any problems
there.

>   2) I have tried to run the project file created by the iMac at School on my
> Linux machine at home, but the Linux machine won't load the project file. It
> complains about the need for a translation method. Please, what do I do?

It sounds like you are running different image versions. Are you using
the plugin image on Linux as well? 

> MS Windows, but doubtless machines of all vintages. The iMac plugin was d/l
> two or three days ago and on the Linux squeak reports its version as:-
> 
> [chris at berty chris]$ squeak -version
> i586-pc-linux-gnu 3.1a-4164 #1 XShm Fri Nov 16 23:20:26 NZDT 2001 gcc 2.96
> Linux berty.localnet 2.4.8-26mdk #1 Sun Sep 23 17:06:39 CEST 2001 i586 unknown

The VM shouldn't be the problem. You can check the image version from
the world menu>>help>>about this system. 

>   3) On the iMac display I noticed that the flap on the right hand side of
> the screen for the tools was not there. As time progresses I hope to be able

That sounds as like you are running a development image on Linux and the
plugin image on the Macs. 

> to start having the children use the workspace and transcript in a simple way.
> So the question is: How do I get the flaps? Do I have to d/l and install a
> full Squeak development system for the iMacs ?

You can get to almost every morph and tool from the object tool, which
is in the widget(?) flap. Another, but not preferred, way is to invoke
the world menu by alt-shift-w and go from there.

Please make sure the children are all using the plugin image to avoid
version conflicts! And running it standalone from the shortcut on the
desktop (both Windows and Mac) avoids a lot of problems with web
browsers.

I wish you more successful mornings!


Michael



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