Putting squeak in business.

Michael Roberts mike at mjr104.co.uk
Mon Nov 17 12:54:00 UTC 2003


On Sun, Nov 16, 2003 at 08:47:24PM -0800, Alan Grimes wrote:
> Andreas Raab wrote:
> > > 1. make a bootable, self-building (no more C) VM for a reasonably
> > > well-designed machine (that is not a PC). including a filesystem and
> > > interrupt driven IO.
> 
> > Don't. Unless you have some constraints you haven't told us, use a 
> > minimal Linux-Kernel and have Squeak sit on top of it.
> 
> <retch>
> 
> > It's small, works well, and has been done before (see Dan's wheather 
> > station). Even if your hardware is out of the ordinary you still got a 
> > chance of the hardware people having (or being willing to produce) 
> > functional Linux drivers. Total cost: Very Few Bucks (tm).
> 
> Well, naturally, I would require that the linux system also be able to
> build itself (I'm not going into the appliance business...) That
> requires approximately 200mb of compressed source and 400mb of compiled
> binaries. 

I'm not sure why you would want the host system to be able to build itself (rather than supply pre-built updates) but as other people have pointed out in this thread you could use a linux distro that builds from source.  From your above comment Linux doesn't seem to be in favour, but one suitable distro is www.gentoo.org which allows you to build the entire system from source.  It has a bsd-style ports system so you can only select the packages that you want.  I would suspect that a minimal gentoo system would come in at less than the sizes you indicate.  You can rebuild the entire host system if you so desire, including the entire system boot-strap.  The excellent frame buffer support that has recently gone into the unix VM means that you only need hardware support from the host OS.  This means that you hardly need anything.  Again this is not news in this thread.


> 
> If I use anything, it will be a port of Plan 9 or perhaps QNX... Just
> about anything with a simple and coherant design... 
> 

Well, I appreciate that you have your opinions on Linux but I would not worry so much about the host OS's design.  Who cares!  Sure QNX looks cool on paper but really, this isn't a nuclear power station.  Why does the design of the OS matter? 

You do not need to present any of the host OS to the user if you develop the necessary interface to it in squeak.  I would go as far as to say that you shouldn't present any of the host OS to the user - if you mean what you say about developing a squeak system.  Therefore, the only useful thing the host OS is doing is hardware support.  If this is the case, I would pick the host OS with the most active hardware support.  Linux seems a good bet for this.  There seem to be more people in the Linux and/or BSD community developing hardware drivers (that you would be able to use for free) than anyone else.  I am constantly amazed that I can plug some random piece of hardware into my pc and find support for it.  This situation is not going to change for a while.  Seems a shame not to use this support.

Cheers

Mike



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list