On 16.04.2009, at 22:06, K. K. Subramaniam wrote:

On Friday 17 April 2009 1:06:36 am karl ramberg wrote:

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Tracker.squeakland.org is for Ètoys.

That makes it my first stop.

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I dont think Etoys will merge in the short future. The task is too big, and other stuff have higher priority.

Who harvests updates and fixes going into the mainline Squeak into Etoys branch? Is this done on a case by case basis by filing separate requests in tracker?

For now, yes. Finding someone doing that on a regular basis would be a most welcome contribution.

- Bert -

Hello!

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Will Etoys ever merge into mainline Squeak (say in Squeak 4.0).

Not in 4.0 yet. But in the long term I hope that Squeakland Etoys will again at least share a base with the squeak.org release, and possibly even be one flavor of it. Ideas welcome.

Concerning this merging aspect: I was last Saturday doing workshops to present Squeak to teachers of the Toulouse region, in France. While I'm a Squeak user since some years now, I decided this time to use the Etoys 3.0 image on normal Ubuntus, to "see" how teachers would react.

The result is clear: Etoys is *much* simpler to use for teachers than Squeak 3.10. Bigger icons, a lot of things useless for end-user removed, much harder to "mess" the image with unexpected windows everywhere, a lot of extremely relevant examples of projects, etc. And translations in a lot of language are available. I will probably promote from now on this Etoys image amongst the teachers.

So my questions are: - what is today the focus of the main Squeak images? education? research? is it meant to stay in developer hands? - what is the mid-term vision? merging with Etoys? - where should I contribute, as someone mostly interested in a concrete use of Squeak with the kids?

Greetings, Severin

On Mon, 2009-05-18 at 14:12 +0700, Serge Stinckwich wrote:

2009/5/18 Séverin Lemaignan skadge@gmail.com:

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Hello!

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Will Etoys ever merge into mainline Squeak (say in Squeak 4.0).

Not in 4.0 yet. But in the long term I hope that Squeakland Etoys will again at least share a base with the squeak.org release, and possibly even be one flavor of it. Ideas welcome.

I'm a bit pessismistic about a future merge ... because the concerns of the different communities (educators, developpers, ...) are very different. Nevertheless, there are various efforts with Squeak 3.11/4.0 and Pharo 1.0, to have a more bug-prone, small kernel. So maybe in the future, Etoys could be based on one of theses initiatives.

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Concerning this merging aspect: I was last Saturday doing workshops to present Squeak to teachers of the Toulouse region, in France. While I'm a Squeak user since some years now, I decided this time to use the Etoys 3.0 image on normal Ubuntus, to "see" how teachers would react.

The result is clear: Etoys is *much* simpler to use for teachers than Squeak 3.10. Bigger icons, a lot of things useless for end-user removed, much harder to "mess" the image with unexpected windows everywhere, a lot of extremely relevant examples of projects, etc. And translations in a lot of language are available. I will probably promote from now on this Etoys image amongst the teachers.

I think it's a good idea.

...

So my questions are:

• what is today the focus of the main Squeak images? education?

research? is it meant to stay in developer hands?

In developer hand i guess.

...

• what is the mid-term vision? merging with Etoys?
• where should I contribute, as someone mostly interested in a

concrete use of Squeak with the kids?

http://squeakland.org/ is the place for all the Etoys activities.

I'm new here. Not to Smalltalk, but that's another long story. I am trying to understand Squeak as an educational tool, and Etoys.

I am a big fan of FreeBSD and am running Squeak 3.9 on FreeBSD 7.1 and Gnome 2.4. Is there something else I need to learn about and develop Etoys? There is no Etoys port in the ports tree.

What does the web browser plug-in do? When I try to sample Etoys on the web site I am told I need the plug-in, yet one does not exist for FreeBSD. Is the Etoys system designed so only developers can build the apps, and students just play with the results via a web browser? Or is the idea to offer an alternative to installing Squeak, to reach a wider audience? If I have Squeak installed, do I need the browser plug-in?

Taking a step back, I have noticed that Squeak has gotten a lot more complex than the Smalltalk I worked with so many years ago. (Hint: it ran on Windows 3.1. Very slowly!) So complex that it may be inappropriate even for high school students. In this sense has it lost sight of Alan Kay's Dynabook? Sorry if this is a recurring issue. Again, my excuse is that I am new here!

On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 09:54 +0100, Frank Shearar wrote:

Gary Dunn wrote:

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I am a big fan of FreeBSD and am running Squeak 3.9 on FreeBSD 7.1 and Gnome 2.4. Is there something else I need to learn about and develop Etoys? There is no Etoys port in the ports tree.

I don't know about the plugin issues that you mention below, but you should just need to install lang/squeak, and download the Etoys image from wherever, and run it.

Sources such as the Squeak swiki say to download Etoys from Squeakland (http://www.squeakland.org/download/), but that is where I only find downloads for Windows, Mac, Debian Linux and a Linux RPM. The release notes suggest these are complete implementations of Squeak. The release notes also describe a universal edition for the XO, but I don't see how to get it.

That is, lang/squeak installs the VM (and a plain image).

The port's a bit dated, installing Squeak 3.9-7. If you want something later than that, Takeshi MUTOH has a beta 3.10 port at http://qml.610t.org/squeak/VM_test.html.

Thanks, but I'm sure I would not know the difference.

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 9:03 AM, Gary Dunn wrote:

I am a big fan of FreeBSD and am running Squeak 3.9 on FreeBSD 7.1 and Gnome 2.4. Is there something else I need to learn about and develop Etoys? There is no Etoys port in the ports tree.

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The port's a bit dated, installing Squeak 3.9-7. If you want something later than that, Takeshi MUTOH has a beta 3.10 port at http://qml.610t.org/squeak/VM_test.html.

Thanks, but I'm sure I would not know the difference.

You _will_ know the difference if you want to use Etoys.

The version of Etoys in Squeak 3.9 is at least 3 years out of date (and was not updated in 3.10 as far as I know.)

VPRI invested a lot of time and money in Etoys in recent years, so that the current version available from http://www.squeakland.org/download/ has both a new virtual machine (VM) and a new smalltalk image.

You don't need to build it from a FreeBSD port repository. You only __need__ 4 things to use or develop with Etoys: the Etoys image file (etoys.image), both Etoys sources files (EtoysV3.sources and etoys.changes), and a Squeak virtual machine.

Squeak images work bit-identically on all platforms, so as long as you get the latest image file and sources files, that is fine. Unzip the Linux DEB or RPM file from http://www.squeakland.org/download/ for the current Etoys files.

A little more difficult is getting a VM, which should be matched to your OS, your processor architecture, and ideally to Etoys. The Etoys VM has new multimedia plugins* and has been optimized for Linux on the XO-1 One Laptop Per Child, though I guess that many of the changes also work on other platforms. I don't run FreeBSD, but I would suggest trying one of the FreeBSD trunk VMs from http://www.squeakvm.org/unix/ . The changelogs at squeakvm.org suggest that many - perhaps all - the Etoys fixes have been added to those builds. If a FreeBSD build doesn't work for you, another option might be the Etoys Linux VM (from the Squeakland DEB or RPM package) under Linux emulation.

(The Linux VM is in ./usr/share/Etoys.app/Contents/Linux686/ in the squeakland DEB archive. Start it with with Bert Freudenberg's shell script etoys.sh included in the DEB/RPM. It may not be 100% functional - when Etoys tries to make a sound on my Ubuntu 9.04 machine I get "soundStart: snd_add_pcm_handler: Function not implemented" but you may be more fortunate than me.)

* a virtual machine plugin is not a browser plugin. Don't worry about the browser plugin for now - the OLPC Sugar project doesn't use it either, as far as I can tell.

What does the web browser plug-in do? When I try to sample Etoys on the web site I am told I need the plug-in, yet one does not exist for FreeBSD. Is the Etoys system designed so only developers can build the apps, and students just play with the results via a web browser? Or is the idea to offer an alternative to installing Squeak, to reach a wider audience? If I have Squeak installed, do I need the browser plug-in?

None of the above. In the way that the Sun Java browser plugin allows you to play games (applets) in your browser window, and the Adobe Reader plugin allows you to read PDFs without leaving your browser, the squeak plugin allows you to play with an Etoys Project File (squeaklet) by clicking a web link, such as the links on http://www.pcs.cnu.edu/~rcaton/ancient/students.html . You need to install Etoys to use the browser plugin.

Anyone, student, teacher or hacker, can develop or improve an Etoy, also known as a Project, by following the tutorials included in Etoys.

Taking a step back, I have noticed that Squeak has gotten a lot more complex than the Smalltalk I worked with so many years ago. (Hint: it ran on Windows 3.1. Very slowly!) So complex that it may be inappropriate even for high school students.

I haven't looked closely at other Smalltalks, but I do have a Cincom VisualWorks image, and Squeak looks similar to that, though the halos and menus seem bigger. If you want the Smalltalk you used 15 years ago, you might find that your vendor offers versions for current operating systems.

Since you already know Smalltalk, the Squeak By Example book may help explain the UI, development tools and syntax of Squeak 3.9 (and Squeak 3.10) http://www.squeakbyexample.org/

There are some other educational tools based on Squeak: Botsinc, Scratch and Alice come to mind. Each teaches different things, and may be more complicated than Etoys, but less complicated than the standard Smalltalk development tools and language.

Hope that helps. I have omitted some details that can be found elsewhere, but if you need further pointers please come back to the list.

David