On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 10:59:57PM -1000, Gary Dunn wrote:
> Today it occurred to me that Alan Kay intended Squeak to be UI for the
> Dynabook. I run Squeak on Gnome on FreeBSD, so just for fun I disabled
> Gnome and started a plain X session using twm, and from an xterm I
> launched Squeak. It looked just like it does in Gnome. The only
> difference I detected in this simple test was that pop-up menus opened
> slower.
> 
> Has anyone tried running Squeak from X without a window manager per se?
> I could test it by writing a .xinitrc file but I don't know how badly
> this could turn out.

Yes, I've done this. I also have OSProcess and CommandShell in the image
so I have access to the OS from Squeak. It works fine, although I don't
usually run it this way because it's easier to just put Squeak into
full screen mode. But it does work, and no window manager is required.

If you want to get even more minimal about it, you can use Squeak as
a /bin/sh replacement, running a headless image with an ExternalCommandShell
running in the image (part of CommandShell package). Again, not terribly
useful but it does work.

Dave