Hi Squeakers,
I'm attempting to build a headless vm for installation on a Linux web server. This machine is command-line only - no X Windows installed - so the standard precompiled distribution doesn't work. Therefore I've tried to build from scratch using this procedure:
1. Download the 3.2-3 release from Ian Piumarta's site.
2. Fire up a 3.2gamma-4881 image on my Mac OS X box and use VMMakerTool to generate unix vm sources.
3. Copy the resulting source tree to the Linux server.
4. Create a bld directory as suggested in the README
5. run ../platforms/unix/config/configure --without-x
6. Hack the resulting Makefiles to add the -DHEADLESS flag to DEFS.
7. make
Compilation of sqXWindows.c fails because of numerous syntax errors, which seem to be related to certain declarations being skipped because HEADLESS was defined.
I also tried the sources from the SourceForge CVS repository, but that didn't work either. Compilation went OK aside from some minor glitches, but linking failed because hundreds of symbols were undefined. It looks like they might by named primitives, but I lack the Squeak-Fu to be able to tell.
Some questions for the VM gurus out there:
1. Is this a reasonable thing to be attempting to do? The presence of --without-x in the configure script and #ifdef HEADLESS in the sources suggest that it is, but I suspect that in practice very few people actually use these options, so they might not be properly maintained.
2. Is there some magic ingredient that I'm missing somewhere? Some switch, flag or button that needs to be pushed?
3. The SF sources seemed to be a bit happier with -HEADLESS than Ian's release. Is there some stable tag that I can check out of the CVS repository? The downloads page only seem to have Windows releases and HEAD seems to be 3.3alpha, which is a little too bleeding edge for deployment.
If there's a HOWTO on this somewhere, I'll be happy to RTFM.
Thanks,
Colin
Colin Putney Whistler.com