[Vm-dev] Compiling squeak-vm for Linux 64bit

José L. Redrejo Rodríguez jredrejo at edu.juntaextremadura.net
Tue Mar 17 07:37:00 UTC 2009


El lun, 16-03-2009 a las 19:57 -0400, David T. Lewis escribió:
> On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 07:36:22PM -0400, whaevr wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 7:27 PM, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
> > > On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 06:04:59PM -0400, whaevr wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Sucess!
> > > >
> > > > Screenshot:
> > > >
> > > > http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/5656/81857129.png
> > >
> > > Nice!
> > >
> > > > Didn't have to change my pkgbuild for etoys or anything. I do have the
> > > > pkgbuild for squeak-vm to checkout of svn for a source. I don't know why
> > > it
> > > > didn't work before with the tarball. I'll brush these pkgbuilds up to
> > > > standard and ship them off to be included in the aur asap!
> > >
> > > Excellent, good progress. A word of caution though: Be careful not
> > > to set the expectation that this is a solid VM. It compiles and runs,
> > > but I can guarantee 100% that there will be problems at runtime,
> > > including crashing the VM when certain functions are exercised. This
> > > is just a matter of working though the type declarations in some VM
> > > plugins (and the sound functions apparently), but we are not there
> > > yet for 64-bit platforms and EToys users are not going to be happy
> > > if the VM crashes in the middle of their creative work ;)
> >  
> > Alright then, I'll hold off on sending the pkgbuilds then. I haven't sent
> > them yet, I've been trying to figure out if its possible to do a selective
> > svn checkout. I don't need to checkout the the windows and mac versions.
> 
> Bert, help me out on this. Who is the target audience? It's great if
> this get released to folks on an experimental basis, but it would be
> a mistake to provide it to EToys users who expect a stable and reliable
> system.
> 
> > Suppose I should wait then for the next stable squeak release?
> > 
> 
> I'm not sure what the timing would be on this. The stable, supported
> Squeak VMs are currently targeted at 32-bit platforms, and for the
> most part people using 64-bit platforms are probably building their
> own. My hunch is that most users of 64-bit VMs are either hobbyists
> like me, or people running servers (such as Seaside web applications)
> where the various multimedia plugins are not important. For EToys,
> the multimedia functions should work without problems, so that is
> why I am saying to be cautious.
> 


I can not agree. I'm using the ltsp project in the secondary schools of
my region: there is a ltsp server with 8 Gb of RAM in every classroom
with 15-30 thin clients. These servers use amd64, betweeen some other
non so obvious reasons, to be able to use correctly the 8 Gb of ram, and
I have to use i386 emulation to be able to poorly run Squeak because the
vm breaks whenever they want to use sound, the plugin (in fact the
plugin doesn't work in i386b either), pango, gstreamer, etc. I'm
speaking of 3.200 servers plus 60.000 clients. And the users are
teachers and students, not hobbyists who can compile a vm by
themselves... Also, the squeak-vm is in the Debian repository, compiled
for non-i386 architectures used in the sugar project and, obviously,
with the same bugs.
And many other places using Debian Edu now know of Squeak and, whenever
they want to use a good ltsp server for the classes, they can not use
Squeak. So, from my point of view, at least fixing sound and pango is
urgent in 64 bits VMs, as both things are used by default in the etoys
image. Fixing the browser plugin should be done also for all the archs,
obviously.

Regards.
José L.
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