Jerry Bell wrote:
I've found some references to 'bare-metal' Squeak implementations. Is anyone working on this?
Squeakers -
There was recently a discussion on comp.lang.forth on a bootable Forth demo ("BootFORTH demo") recently released for FreeBSD. There has been interest in the past for doing this for Squeak, although still no working demo I know of (other than Squeak for DOS, which might in theory boot from a floppy (size?), but still requires a non-free OS).
I would imagine the big issue isn't getting something to boot -- it is having a knowledge base for interacting with the variety of graphics cards, ethernet cards, modems, SCSI adapters, HD drives, etc.
Here are two links from the Forth discussion:
http://www.freebsd.org/~picobsd/ This page contains information on developing FreeBSD to work in various small and unusual places, such as single floppy, vnode (vn(4)) partitions or embedded controllers. Includes image for single floppy bootable Forth version.
http://www.moore160.freeserve.co.uk/dmjx.htm David Moore's Joshua 32 bit x86 RT/Operating System
-Paul Fernhout Kurtz-Fernhout Software ========================================================= Developers of custom software and educational simulations Creators of the Garden with Insight(TM) garden simulator http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com