Hi Folks,
I just visited a local elementary school computer lab with 24 PowerMac 7000 series computers with OS 7.x
Yes, they are "slow" and with limited capacity but they are networked. Some are having serious hardware memory problems. Unfortunately, after three defeats of the technology bond, there will me no replacements. So, I'm thinking of volunteering as a SysAdmin and pumping these systems for all their worth.
How can SQUEAK be made to run on the PowerMacs mentioned above?
:-) edwin
Hi Folks,
I just visited a local elementary school computer lab with 24 PowerMac 7000 series computers with OS 7.x
Yes, they are "slow" and with limited capacity but they are networked. Some are having serious hardware memory problems. Unfortunately, after three defeats of the technology bond, there will me no replacements. So, I'm thinking of volunteering as a SysAdmin and pumping these systems for all their worth.
How can SQUEAK be made to run on the PowerMacs mentioned above?
:-) edwin
Well. Squeak should run on this machines. I've attempted to ensure that Squeak will run on System 7.5.5 machines. But to fully utilize 'better' networking ie the ability not to drop most incoming connections as swikis they require Open Transport.
Also I'm sure I've a 7200 here that is running OS 9.1 You just need 32mb of ram. However you might want to see what the impact performance wise is, and perhaps licence wise $$ before considering upgrading. Mind 9.1 is very stable and of course uptodate with all the new OS features.
The other thing is getting a reasonably small squeak image, right now you need about 20MB to run things. Is that too large, you might only have say 10mb to play with which will mean you need to trim an image, or build one from stable squeak. I *think* memory is very cheap for these machines and having more will improve their life span, for example I've 48MB in the 7200. with more memory then more things are feasible.
I should also point out that use of the jitter 3 VM might make a noticeable difference. Also remember these machines will run Linuxppc so you could migrate to a unix environment and run the unix version of Squeak. You might find the performance is better, and there is an emulator to run mac OS 8 & 9 under linux. But I'd think this configuration is more work to manage.
Edwin,
John wrote:
The other thing is getting a reasonably small squeak image, right now you need about 20MB to run things. Is that too large, you might only have say 10mb to play with which will mean you need to trim an image, or build one from stable squeak.
You may want to use the plugin image from Squeakland.org (which, btw, is the image that we installed last week in two schools in L.A.). This is a relatively small image (~5.5MB) and includes everything you'll probably need (the only 'interesting' stuff that's missing is 3D but I doubt this is an issue on this class of machines). However, it's still a good idea to give Squeak as much RAM as somehow possible - once the kids get going we need some memory to store all the art.
Cheers, - Andreas
PS. If you have any other questions regarding class room use of Squeak, the squeakland.org mailing list might be a better forum for a discussion.
Mike Rueger is currently (I hope) trying to figure out why I still don't have e-mail confirmation. I've tried subscribing to squeakland about 3 times already.
Anyway, thanks for the tips. I'll see what I can do next week to get SQUEAK on those machines. They also have several Apple II's, Macs, PowerBooks and a cart full of some kind of "toy" computer. If I can get SQUEAK to work on the PowerMacs and the kids really get into it ... does it prove the idiom that it's not the box but the software that really matters?
:-) edwin
P.S. I haven't been in the Apple world since the demise of Lisa and the introduction of the flower-child iMac. About now, I wish I kept all my hacked 5.25 inch floppies... VisiCalc anyone?
-----Original Message----- From: squeak-dev-admin@lists.squeakfoundation.org [mailto:squeak-dev-admin@lists.squeakfoundation.org]On Behalf Of Andreas Raab
You may want to use the plugin image from Squeakland.org (which, btw, is the image that we installed last week in two schools in L.A.). This is a relatively small image (~5.5MB) and includes everything you'll probably need (the only 'interesting' stuff that's missing is 3D but I doubt this is an issue on this class of machines). However, it's still a good idea to give Squeak as much RAM as somehow possible - once the kids get going we need some memory to store all the art.
Cheers, - Andreas
PS. If you have any other questions regarding class room use of Squeak, the squeakland.org mailing list might be a better forum for a discussion.
Edwin --
Well, it's always more about the kids than about Squeak. A great system (in the hands of the right teachers) for this level machine is LOGO Microworlds. It is not free (and might not be available now), and I don't know what their site license costs.
Remembering that Smalltalk ran very acceptably all the way back in in the seventies (and that Digitalk Smalltalk/V ran well on the 7000), we can surmise that the central part of Squeak will also. Morphic might not run well enough to allow the children's etoy stuff to be used.
But, I'm sure that one fairly easily could set up a Microworlds like UI for the kids in Squeak, and this should run just as well as the official Microworlds. I would still use sketchmorphs that the kids make by painting. But it's likely that the DnD etoy UI will not have enough cycles to be friendly. But, you can still pretty easily set up to do textual scripting on the sketchmorphs -- and this would be very much like Microworlds in many respects. I think there is a preference that will turn off the Morphic animation for dragging stuff and replace it with outlines (like MVS). This should also make things easier. And, as Andreas mentioned, you might want to use the Squeakland Plugin image because of its small size.
However, I also seem to recall giving quite a few demos of the etoys on just the kind of machines you have, so it might work a lot better than we fear. You should be able to just use a vanilla Squeak on them.
Cheers,
Alan
------
At 6:05 PM -0700 9/7/01, Edwin Pilobello wrote:
Hi Folks,
I just visited a local elementary school computer lab with 24 PowerMac 7000 series computers with OS 7.x
Yes, they are "slow" and with limited capacity but they are networked. Some are having serious hardware memory problems. Unfortunately, after three defeats of the technology bond, there will me no replacements. So, I'm thinking of volunteering as a SysAdmin and pumping these systems for all their worth.
How can SQUEAK be made to run on the PowerMacs mentioned above?
:-) edwin
squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org
-
Alan Kay -
Andreas Raab -
Edwin Pilobello -
John M McIntosh