Everyone,  thank you for your quick replies!

 >> (Christian Mascher wrote:)
 >> Putting all four files into every individual students home-directory
 >> would obviously work, but then I would have to give them much more
 >> disk space, which I feel should not be necessary, as the bulk of the
 >> image and the .exe-file are the same for everybody.

Bert Freudenberg <bert at impara.de> wrote:
 > The VM (.exe) and sources (SqueakV3.sources) are read-only and can be
 > shared. What you need for every student is an image and changes file
 > (these always go together). The image is not the same for everyone
 > because it is a snapshot of the "living" object memory, and the
 > changes are obviously different.

I had read about this in Mark Guzdials Book, but thanks for spelling 
this out for a newbie.

 > You can reduce the size of the changes file, however, which tracks the
 > changes in source code relative to the sources file. So just do a
 > "Smalltalk condenseSources", which moves all changes to the sources
 > file, and updates the source pointers in the image correspondingly.
 > The resulting sources, image, and changes (which are only a few bytes
 > after the process) you can put onto the server. Every student then
 > needs to copy image+changes into her directory.

Great. That was  exactly the information I was asking for. Thank you.

Alan Kay wrote:
 > Why not try to at least give them as much disk
 > space as they need, and individual laptops would be even better 
(since > much of the best student work will be done outside of the 
classroom).

Well, sure, I will have to be more generous with server disk-space 
<wink> when using squeak. 21 students' images will probably be no 
problem even given our quite full /home, but it is a difference compared 
to when using other languages, say python, where the individuals only 
save source (text-)files which take up hardly no space.

Not arguing with the smalltalk way of doing this, only up to now, my 
students didn't need a starting point of 15 MB in their home.

The problem is probably that computers in a school-lab are no real 
_personal_ computers (because they are used by so many different users). 
Individual laptops would be. And squeak is designed for a true personal 
computer.

 > And out of curiosity: What school are you from? Also you might want to
 > join the German Squeak mailinglist (see squeak.de).

I'm at Christian-Rohlfs-Gymnasium, Hagen/Westfalen. I will take a look.

Cheers,

Christian






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