[squeak-dev] Installing Squeak on a Raspberry Pi for newcomers

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Wed Jul 2 16:51:02 UTC 2014


I recently tried to answer a query on the Pi forum about getting Squeak images on a Pi/Raspbian. It was a lot more involved than I’d hoped and I really think we could do more to make life easier.

The query and my answer are at - http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=80556 and I would be interested in better answers. One important issue is that the current Scratch system installed by default in Raspbian requires a plain interpreter VM since it is an old format image that cannot run on the newer StackVM that supports the improved Scratch I’m developing for the Pi foundation. So, simply replacing the vm is not ok, we would need to have both in order to get the best from a 4.5 image.

Extra confusion is caused (for me) by the assorted scripts that get involved; there is a ‘squeak’ shell script somewhere that does all sorts of stuff including opening a dialogue that is supposed to help you find an image to run but seemingly does nothing actually useful. There’s also a ‘scratch’ shell script that does other odd stuff.

This is a problem very likely to be faced by a lot of newcomers stumbling across Squeak on their Pi’s. Anything we can do to make it *really* easy for people to try Squeak could pay off in a lot of interested new users.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
People who deal with bits should expect to get bitten.




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