[Vm-dev] nuSqueak source

[tim Rowledge]

Hi - we were just talking about you at the squeak board meeting :-)

> On 2020-10-21, at 10:14 AM, Yoshiki Ohshima <Yoshiki.Ohshima at acm.org> wrote:
> I heard that people got a new problem in inputting Japanese text into Scratch 1.4 running on Raspberry Pi OS after, or around the version 2020-08-20. I would like to take a look at it but it might involve recompiling and generating  the VM with debugging info.  Last time I looked into it was years and years ago and I need to basically make a fresh start.
> 
> Is the process of making NuSqeauk VM For Raspberry Pi up to date and straightforward? Can people point me to the right point to start?

You shouldn't need to do anything special with the VM as far as I remember; I'll try to dig into my notes to see what I might have done. What I *do* recall is some problem with the X input method application - I managed to make it work at some point but then it catastrophically interfered with some other important thing. According to my ancient email archive I had quite a few messages with you and Kazuhiro-san to make this (almost) work in mid-2106. Something about an 'ibus' compositor window?

Building the VM is completely vanilla; clone the opensmalltalk vm repository, run Eliot's magic scripts to build the VMMaker image if you need to do any serious development work, or just run the 'mvm' scripts in the relevant directory to build from the current sources. On a Pi4 it only takes a couple of minutes.


Ah - here's something to do with it -
in /usr/bin/squeak

# see if the XMODIFIERS stuff is being used
# CURRENTLY DISABLED
# serious problem in the keypress handling is causedby invoking it
#if echo $XMODIFIERS | grep '@im=' > /dev/null; then
#    COMPIN="-compositioninput"
#fi

So, one question is whether the current VM even has that cmdline option. And whether the applicable X input tool is available. Ah-hah - another old email - 

ibus
ibus-anthy
ttf-kochi-gothic
xfonts-intl-japanese
xfonts-intl-japanese-big xfonts-kaname

- some libraries that needed to be installed.

The current NuScratch image is included in the Raspberry Pi OS releases and *shouldn't* need any changes in order to work with the compositioninput stuff, at least as well or badly as it ever did. The VM included is certainly a few years old but it is a Cog/Spur system and the image will happily run on a latest VM. I will someday make a new release for RPF but they're all into the JS/HTML Scratch3 now.

Making a new NuScratch image is, I hope, decently explained in the package on squeaksource, with some more info on the swiki at http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1263 and http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6604


Hope that helps a bit - let me know!

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Fractured Idiom:- PORTE-KOCHERE - Sacramental wine