Hi all,

Can you help?


context: squeak test piloting on Ubuntu 8.04 (Long term support til April 2013) 

Problem: Each time a new release comes out their needs to be a way to launch it which doesn't interfere/collide or invalidate the ways of launching other releases/versions

Desired: A drag and drop solution.

Basically drag an icon onto another icon have an image open in a vm.

The dragged icon would represent the image the target icon would represent the vm.

Have everything work. Sound plays. Squeak can find sources and changes, local and external repositories. Etc.

Rationale:


On my old Mac I had several icons representing different vms. Several icons representing different images.

Things were simpler then, most vm's would open most images. However if there were special circumstances I just needed to keep related icons near each other to clear up the confusion.

Problem:

On Ubuntu I have an old squeak already installed via the add/remove mechanism Ubuntu provides. I would like to keep that as it is.

I also have an Etoys installed and plan to keep that.

The newer images and vms are stored in folders in my home directory not in the shared system library. That works because my computer is still in a one person, one login, personal computer configuration.

The Gnome launcher mechanism allows me to make a specialized launcher icon for each image. My level of knowledge so far allows me to use a simple launch command

mydir/mySqueakVm -plugins mydir/myPlugingDir myDir/mySqueak.image

This has served me as well as I needed until recently.

Two problem have arisen. 
First across images cutting and pasting loses line endings.
Dragging and drooping .jpg and .gif files onto an open squeak window raises an MNU from a perplexed nil.

So I am having to up my game.

My current level of knowledge is below that of heavy shell scripting (I am willing to learn slowly).
My current interest is to get to the squeak programming w/o massive cramming on new fields of unix knowledge. Again, I am willing to learn sloooowly.


Attempts at a solution and where they fall short:

I have downloaded and unpacked the latest release candidate and the latest linux vms which are needed to run them into a home directory.

I have tried opening the squeak.sh script by double clicking on it.

First it complained about finding no image. So I put a link to the current image in 
myDir/lib/squeak/ where it said it looked.

Second it now offered to install the image. Huh?

By install what does that mean? 
Would it put the image in the system directories below root?
Or would it install the image somewhere in my personal folders?

Since it now has enough bits why doesn't it just offer to launch the image with the vm as is, installing nothing?
Which is what I wished.

So I am looking for help.
First is there a variation of the shell script that can just launch an image?

Second, what mechanisms are available on Ubuntu to allow me to implement a drag and drop feature as I had on my old mac?

Thanks in advance for your time and assistance.

Yours in curiosity and service, --Jerome Peace