here we go.. some notes from recent days..

my setup
--------
P233 laptop, 96M ram, debian gnu/linux. I have some nice
squeak-{image,sources,vm} debian packages installed, and these were
working quite well before; but decided to build the latest vm I could
find to see if it would help with some of the problems below, and to
see if the plugin configuration might be better.  So built Ian
Piumarta's version 3.1 (I think ?) vm from source. This went smoothly.

I'm running a test-pilot image (fellow newbies, that's the 3.0 image
plus all updates. Also known as 3.1a or more precisely, a number like
4282 referring to the latest changeset you've downloaded).

updating
--------
My first time booting up squeak in a month or two.  Remembered having
memory problems last time so I wanted a clean image not bloated with
projects & cruft. On my system all images are in ~/.squeak, including
a pristine copy of the 3.0 release image; so did an "ls -l
*.{image,changes}" to compare sizes. Loaded all old images to find out
what's what ("squeak -memory 32m -jit -xshm ~/.squeak/my.image").
Don't know if the -jit & -xshm have any real effect on my system, but
I want whatever crumbs of speed I can get.

Found one that was not too much larger than the release image, and
with my preferences configured, so attempted to bring it up to date
via "load code updates".  Ran into various errors during the update
process whose details I've forgotten. A couple were the kind where you
could abort and the next "load code updates" would carry on with the
next changeset. I think I hit one that I could not get past and
moved on to a cleaner image.

Got an image fully updated but was seeing some user interface problems
- first, could mouse around but no keyboard input was recognized; a
familiar glitch but couldn't remember how I fixed it last
time. Whatever, on a later startup of the same image I saw keyboard
input working but a new problem: when attempting to download projects
from BSS (Bob's Super Swiki), clicking in the directory list of the
Find dialog or the equivalent FileList2 window no longer had any
effect. Didn't feel up to debugging this so scratched that image and..

started from the official release 3.0 image. Was able to update this
all the way; some interaction required, no problems. This took an hour
or so on my system; made sure to save the result as my new starter
image (see recent post for where to download pre-updated images).

Fellow newbies, the lesson here is to be prepared and willing to
abandon your image and start from a fresh one as needed.  Make sure to
save any important work as changesets of course. To save time, keep a
clean up-to-date starter image around. (*)

-Simon

(*) better advice from the more experienced always welcome