[Squeakland] Squeak fails to run after install: security problems?

[Alan Kay]

Hi Simon --

Just for a little context ...

The Squeak you have been using (probably 3.6 or so) has a complete 
Etoys in it. It might still be the most useful vehicle for what you 
are trying to do. A shift-alt on any graphical object will bring up 
an Etoys halo of handles, and the blue eyeball will open a viewer for 
that Etoy player. Dragging out a behavior tile (like "forward 5") 
onto the desktop will make a script and put the "forward 5" into the script.

You can also get an Etoys developer image. This, again, is the 
regular Squeak with certain preferences set. Let us know if you are interested.

The Etoys version (from Squeakland) is aimed mostly at ages 9-12, but 
has worked well for younger children, and to a lesser extent for 
older children (they could use a few more facilities). Many teachers 
(especially non-technical teachers) have enjoyed using EToys.

Etoys and Squeak have no external security models, so the 
difficulties you are encountering are solely due to some combination 
of MS and the sysAdmins in your shop, plus where the Squeakland 
installer puts things so it can be run as a plugin.

Because the Squeakland version is also set up to be able to run as a 
plugin, it is sandboxed for safety. It is possible that you would 
like more control over things. Basically, the Squeakland version is 
pretty much a regular Squeak with a number of preferences set to 
limit the view that the end-user takes of what's available. You may 
very well want to relax these preferences. Let us know and we'll 
explain how to do it.

Basically, to take more control, you need to gather three or four files:
  - the image, which contains the system and the objects
  - the VM, which contains the equivalent of the Squeak OS and the 
interpreter, graphics kernel, sound, sockets, etc.
  - the sources, which contains the indexed text of all the source 
code in the system
  - the changes, which contains the incremental additions that have 
been made to the system and allows the Squeak developer to revert to 
earlier versions, etc. The Squeakland image is set to not write to 
changes, but this can be changed.

If you drop the image on the VM, then Squeak will start up. MS can 
also be told to use a particular VM as a default for a double click 
on an image.

You should be familiar with these already from your experience with Squeak.

We are interested in what you are trying to do and would like to 
help. Please ask.

Cheers,

Alan



At 01:25 PM 2/6/2007, Simon Guest wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I'm a maths teacher (and ex software engineer), and have been playing
>with the developer version of Squeak for a while now, and although the
>learning curve is fairly steep, I am using it successfully in school.
>
>I see that the Squeakland release is recommended for teachers over the
>squeak.org version, I guess because etoys have been made to work
>nicely.  However, I am experiencing severe frustration in getting it
>to run.  What is the security model?
>
>Here's the problem.  On WinXP, I install it as administrator.  As soon
>as I try to run as a normal user, it fails ("a primitive has failed",
>although the error message is in German).  I think this is because I
>cannot write to the image file, quite rightly, since it is owned by
>the administrator, and as a normal user I could not be trusted not to
>muck it up.
>
>So I copied the image file into my own directory, and ran the
>Squeakland vm on it, but it fails with the same error.  Can anyone
>help?
>
>I'm a little discouraged, as I'm wondering how I will persuade much
>less technically oriented colleagues in school that Squeak is useful
>for teaching if the installation is a black art.  I am sure my mode of
>use must be the most common among school users of Squeak.  Could it
>not be supported by the default install?
>
>cheers,
>Simon
>
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