Installing Squeak

Note: The desciption below will get you the system-developer's version of Squeak. On the laptop there is a special Squeak distribution derived from squeakland.org. See Etoys for information on the actual OLPC version. --Bert

Download files

On the Squeak download page, click the appropriate link to download the virtual machine and image for your computer and operating system.

Untar the file into a directory.

Go into the directory and run

sh ./INSTALL

to install the virtual machine.

Choose or create a directory to run Squeak in, and run

inisqueak

there to create your personal image file.

(I haven't found the inisqueak script, so I hope someone will edit this.)

OR copy the image file, the changes file and the sources file to your working directory, and change their names to squeak.image, squeak.change, and squeak.sources. (I don't yet know if this last is necessary. Anybody?)

I'm a bit rusty on but I'll try to help here. Notwithstanding, I strongly recommend reading some material probably starting either at Why Smalltalk's Squeak Tutorials page, or the hectic Squeak.org wiki (or try a Google search)

Squeak, as a direct descendant of Smalltalk-80, manages those three files as following:

.image

is the file where the snapshot of the objects are stored / serialized.

.change

is where all the changes done by the user (method editions, sending messages (manually) to objects, etc.) is stored. That's the reason why it's crucial to keep both the .image & .change files together at all times.

.sources

is where the method's sources are kept - but only the 'original' source - once you change a base method, it's source will be stored in .change—so if your paths are correct, this file doesn't need to be copied.

Finally, you can do a Save As from within to create ad-hoc copies of the pair .image & .change and remain consistant.

Any questions, please ask. --Xavi 19:37, 20 January 2007 (EST)

Run

squeak

and you get an amazingly rich but underdocumented graphical programming environement. If OLPC wants a proper manual for all of this, I'm an experienced Tech Writer with lots of API and other programming documentation experience who learned Smalltalk from the books when they first came out, and I'm available.--Mokurai 05:36, 12 October 2006 (EDT)