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

David Corking lists at dcorking.com
Wed Jul 2 17:37:35 UTC 2014


> 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.

I don't have better answers, only more questions and ideas, which I am
sorry about since one questioner on the forum must mean there are 10
or 100 others who already gave up, and more who find Squeak on their
machine each week. I am delighted that Herbert found it
straightforward.

On the RPi, does the Cog StackVM give measurably better performance
than the interpreter VM we all know and love? (I run Squeak 4.5 on the
interpreter VM but my PC is a lot faster than a Pi.)

Does your new Scratch image take ideas from Phratch
http://www.phratch.com/ , or indeed BYOB http://byob.berkeley.edu/ or
other Scratch forks, or is it entirely independent?

It would be great if more of us developed some packaging skill, with a
view to providing a path to upstream Raspbian and Debian adopting
cleaned up packages. Sadly Linux packaging is not a skill I have yet.

I too have dug through the scripts and found them confusing. The
startup script that Bert wrote for Linux is in the Etoys distribution
at squeakland.org : I am a big fan of that as it seems to find
everything effectively (plugins drivers and of course the image) and
start up cleanly. I don't know if it is in any squeak.org downloads,
but I am pretty sure that official Debian and Fedora packages use
older and arguably slightly flaky or harder to use scripts (except for
Sugar, but that is wrapped in some Python goodness that Bert cooked
up.)

To get everyone else thinking, I wrote one sketch of an approach, if
we find the right volunteers:
* Distribute zipped images the way Herbert suggested (and via the RPi
website if you have the contacts.)
* cleanup or expand the launch script so it launches Scratch, new
Scratch and Squeak 4.5 (if it doesn't already)
* prototype a suite of deb packages for Raspbian
* when the prototypes are building cleanly, consider a public release
* use them as a template to work with the Debian package mainainers
* start prototyping a move to one of the Cog VMs (I don't know the
relative merits of Stack, JIT or Spur)
* ...

Even though I don't own an RPi, I am sure I can emulate one on Qemu,
and I would love to help if we can get a small project together to
tackle this in bite-sized or nibble-sized chunks.

David.


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