A Suggested Promotion

Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote on squeak-dev:
>>In fact, it could be an extremely stripped down Linux focused exclusively
>>on running Squeak (like Dan Ingalls did for his weather station). One
>>advantage of that is that the boot time would be much smaller than what
>>people are used to.

John Hylands wrote on squeak-dev
>My brother and I have been experimenting with Tiny Core Linux, which is
>available on the Pi as piCore.
>
>It boots in 12 seconds, from power on to login prompt, on a Pi 2. That
>gives you wifi plus an openssh server. It would probably add a few seconds
>to get a graphical shell running, which it also includes.

Note that for Pharo there is a project from Mike Filonov (owner of pharocloud.com) which
was initially called "PharoNOS". It is also based on TinyCore Linux, here x86 based
directly booting into Pharo. A description and an downloadable ISO is available on [1].
Runs fine on VirtualBox.

>From the name often people thought it was a project similar to "SqueakNOS" (but SqueakNOS boots
into Squeak and needed no Linux or other underneath as even the drivers were
written in Smalltalk). I guess therefore Mike renamed the project to "Pharocloud OS" now,
he also made the build scripts available on [2].

I also did some experiments with Pharo on the Pi - described in an article on [3].
The result was similar: directly booting into the Pharo environment/ a Smalltalk
application - but on the Pi. There is Raspbian underneath. A video is available on [4].

However: if there is now some interest in having a fast and direct Squeak/Pharo booting
         on the Pi maybe this could be a shared effort between both communities as well.

Beside squeak-dev I therefore CC the pharo-dev mailinglist as well.

Bye
T.

[1] http://pillarhub.pharocloud.com/hub/mikefilonov/pharonos
[2] http://os.pharocloud.com
[3] https://medium.com/concerning-pharo/pharo-pi-9eef257b6a21#.qgqg6765p
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfxFqQIuawg

Raspbian already has an option to boot straight to Scratch, so I don’t imagine it would be hard to copy whatever settings are used. I don’t know if it currently runs it with -vm-display-fb but I imagine it could.

I’m not a huge fan (having tried it in the past) of “nothing but Smalltalk” because it’s so damn hard. All those tricky hardware drivers to futz with and changing hardware and … ugh. It seems much more sensible to me to use a Smalltalk as the layer above a decent kernel, to add tools to do all the things one normally needs to do and get the benefits of both systems. Of course, there’s still a *staggering* amount of work to do that.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
"How many Grogs does it take to change a lightbulb?”
"One. Something with manipulatory appendages will be along eventually."

Tim Rowledge wrote on Wed, 23 Dec 2015 09:45:25 -0800
> I?m not a huge fan (having tried it in the past) of ?nothing but Smalltalk?
> because it?s so damn hard. All those tricky hardware drivers to futz with
> and changing hardware and ? ugh. It seems much more sensible to me
> to use a Smalltalk as the layer above a decent kernel, to add tools to do
> all the things one normally needs to do and get the benefits of both
> systems. Of course, there?s still a *staggering* amount of work to do that.

C code doesn't write itself, and is as much work to produce it as the
equivalent Smalltalk code. Of course, in practically all situations with
machines like PCs or the Raspberry Pi someone has already done the C
version but the Smalltalk version would still have to be written if
anyone were interested in it. I fully agree this is essentially
pointless. Since I am interested in new machines, the situation is a bit
different.

There is a way to do an OS in Smalltalk and still make use of existing C
code:

https://marcusdenker.de/Squeak/SqueakOS/

Unfortunately, not only is this way out of date but the FluxOS/OSKit
project on which it is based has been dead for a very long time (as far
as I know).

Anyway, isn't there an additional complication in the original Raspberry
Pi where the boot code runs on the graphics processor instead of the
ARM? The issue is which is the simplest way to get Pi users to run
Squeak? A package they can load into Raspbian with everything they need
to use the pre-installed VM? An All-In-One package? A complete SD card
image? Actual SD cards (this costs money to distribute)?

-- Jecel