Re: File locations for linux (and mostly other *nix too)

> On Jun 16, 2026, at 1:17 PM, [email protected] wrote:
> 
> Phil! Really good to hear from you :-)

Absolutely; knowing that important contributors are still around is encouraging. Who knows, one day we might even complete the near-mythical DebianOfficialPackage fantasy?


> Thanks very much for your work and support on this topic in that past, and hopefully we can find ways to make some more progress.
> Tim, minor details aside I agree very much with what you said. You are probably aware (but others may not be) that Phil has done some important work on making opensmalltalk-vm and squeakvm be consistent with *nix standards and conventions, and our goal was (is?) to be able to support the rather stringent requirements of the Debian project (which in turn is the basis for many other derivative Linux distros). Vanessa was an important contributor as well.
> Many of the necessary pieces are already in place, but not well advertised. For example, if you are building opensmalltalk-vm for your Raspberry Pi, try doing a "sudo make install" right after you run the "mvm" the build directory. You will see /usr/local/bin/spur64 installed and pointing to a quite reasonable library location for the VM itself. I should put together some notes on the various pieces like this that are already sorted out, maybe next week because I'll need to dust off some old notes and tired memory cells.

Anything we can do to improve things is a welcome bit of progress. 

Looking quickly at the documentation for the AppImage stuff, it looks promising, though I can’t yet work out if using one requires any time consuming CPU work at each launch. I do see that it is in fact very much based on the Acorn RISC OS idea; ROX was very much inspired by Tom Leonard’s RISC OS experience. I can even faintly remember talking with him about it decades ago and trying it out on a NetWinder box.

It looks as if we could plausibly produce AppImage file for multiple architectures? And surely we could (optionally) include VMs for multiple image versions, even with an option to run a non-Cog VM 


tim
--
tim Rowledge; [email protected]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Success always occurs in private, and failure in full view.


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