SqueakOS the cheaters way

Cold boot to Squeak under 6 seconds? Possible. I haven't actually automated it yet, but it is possible as described below.

Tiny Core Linux is a mini Linux distribution that is, before boot, only two files. One is the Linux kernel. The other is the entire filesystem which is loaded into RAM. These two files are packaged up into a bootable .iso image for burning to a CD, although you can put them on any bootable medium and boot them using grub. You can put these files on an existing Linux partition on your hard disk, for example. The "tiny" version is 10MB and has a graphical interface and package manager! The "micro" version is 6MB and is only a command line. They boot really fast.

Now, the micro version can be used to run Squeak:

1. Boot it up using one of the "vga=" command line parameters to get a working framebuffer. You could use grub to persist this setting.
   
2. Get Squeak into the filesystem somehow. I used wget to fetch an image and the Linux VM from ftp://ftp.squeak.org/. A more permanent option would be mounting an existing filesystem.
   
3. Become root (sudo su) to run Squeak, or fix the permissions on /dev/input/mice.
4. Run squeak: "bin/squeak -vm-display-fbdev".

This is not quite as cool as SqueakNOS, but it is a practical, easy and stable way of running Squeak as if it were the OS with good hardware support and a filesystem.

Squeak vs Pharo

How does Squeak compare to Pharo?

Well, people will have different experiences. Some will find the features of Pharo appealing. Pharo comes with a huge range of developer tools: syntax highlighting, autocompletion, code refactoring tools and a whole lot of smaller enhancements that people might like.

Pharo looks nicer than Squeak. They've dared to change the menus around, in my opinion, for the better. They've taken a lot of inspiration ("blatently copied") from the Macintosh UI. They've also changed much of the interaction with the user, although the whole UI still freezes up whenever the image is doing something (please, learn to use multi-threading! It isn't hard!).

I've been living on Pharo for the last 6 months because I wanted to use and modify the NewCompiler. I've gone back to Squeak. Why? Pharo is too slow. I have a Celeron clocked at 1.7GHz. Pharo's debugger takes forever to appear when something goes wrong. The browser is very laggy to type into. The UI in general looks like a Porshe, but certainly doesn't perform like one.

The deal-breaker for me was that Pharo couldn't load a Monticello package I wrote. Pharo would freeze up, and alt-. would not recover it. Apparently this has been fixed in the later releases.

So I'm back in Squeak. It's still slow like Squeak is, but at least the debugger comes up in a reasonable amount of time.

Dammit, Nethack!

I have been a bit... distracted lately by a certain chaotic elven wizard with a penchant for Yendorian amulets. I'll be back into SecureSqueak shortly.