[Help] Launching test pilot images in Ubuntu, preferably with drag and drop.

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




 



     

Hi Jerome,

On Apr 11, 2010, at 5:43 PM, Jerome Peace wrote:

> First across images cutting and pasting loses line endings.

Fix your locale settings in your .profile or .bashrc or whatever you  
use.  Adding

export LC_ALL=C

or

export LC_ALL=en.US_UTF-8

or

export LC_ALL=$LANG

will probably fix it.  Open a new shell and try again.

> Dragging and drooping .jpg and .gif files onto an open squeak window  
> raises an MNU from a perplexed nil.

No idea.  The drop&drop plugin hasn't changed in years.  If something  
in the image changed to need different plugin behaviour, nobody told  
me (or Takashi, who wrote the plugin).

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

squeak.sh is for running squeak from a menu item.  Applications >  
Accessories > Squeak, for example.  It's neither designed to be run  
from the command line nor to be clicked on in a file manager.

> 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?

It thinks you clicked on a menu item and it's trying to copy an image  
from /usr/local/lib/squeak into your home dir so you can write to it.

> By install what does that mean?

Copy.  From /usr/local/lib/squeak to somewhere under your home  
directory.

> Would it put the image in the system directories below root?
> Or would it install the image somewhere in my personal folders?

It could do either, or both, if you happen to be root.  But normally  
the latter.

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

Because it thinks it's running from a menu item that you clicked,  
i.e., without any way to pass an argument to the script, and therefore  
assumes it has insufficient information about which VM to launch.

> First is there a variation of the shell script that can just launch  
> an image?

Yes.  It's called "squeak".  It's probably just above "squeak.sh" in  
the same folder.  It assumes you're running from a command line and  
will pay attention to everything you tell it.  It'll also fix your  
locale if it thinks it's broken, giving you back your line endings.

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

For dragging graphics into a running image?  The code is already there  
and works perfectly for me in a 3.10.20 #7179 image.

For dragging images onto a VM, that's between you and your desktop  
manager.  I've never bothered to figure this out, but I'd be happy to  
try in some other, less busy, week.  Some simple addition to squeak or  
squeak.sh could be made to look for images in/around its own directory.

HTH.

Cheers,
Ian

On 4/11/2010 6:10 PM, Ian Piumarta wrote:
>> Dragging and drooping .jpg and .gif files onto an open squeak window
>> raises an MNU from a perplexed nil.
>
> No idea. The drop&drop plugin hasn't changed in years. If something in
> the image changed to need different plugin behaviour, nobody told me (or
> Takashi, who wrote the plugin).

This has been fixed. The issue wasn't the VM, it was that the code in
the image went through a different path than the usual file creation and
hadn't been updated. @Jerome: Try this with rc3, it should work there.

Cheers,
   - Andreas