[Cuis-dev] Embedded Squeak/Cuis

[Casey Ransberger]

I looked at writing an X11 window manager as a plugin for Squeak. But my search for “how make x11 window manager" didn’t turn up much. I pulled down the source for a supposedly minimal wm and looked at the total LoC and thought “yeah, maybe not.”

It would still be cool to see native applications running inside of SystemWindows. Obviously the native widgets would be jarring, but it’s better in my mind than having to switch out of a full-screen smalltalk to a full-screen desktop (this is an insight I got running Windows on a Mac with a feature called Synergy, which allowed Windows windows to coexist with Mac windows on the same desktop.

Anyway, I’m super glad we’ve got Cuis running in the framebuffer. X11 is over-rated anyway. We still have the problem of needing to drag a whole operating system (there shouldn’t be one) along with us if we want to be able to use a web browser, and we kind of need to use a web browser nowadays (sigh.) Someday I’d like to crack that egg.

—Casey

> On Aug 22, 2020, at 2:41 PM, ken.dickey--- via Cuis-dev <cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st> wrote:
> 
> The saying goes
> - once is happenstance
> - twice is just circumstance
> - the third time and you have discovered a Natural Law
> 
> So what does this have to do with anything?
> 
> Well, I now have a revitalized vm-display-fbdev working on
>  Raspberry Pi 3           -- Alpine Linux
>  Raspberry Pi 4           -- Alpine Linux
> and
>  LePotato (AML-s905x-cc)  -- Armbian (Debian) Linux
> 
> Which run Squeak and Cuis images.
> 
> Uses libevdev and a framebuffer.  Works with libc or MUSL.  No X11!
> 
> 
> Look, ma! Smalltalk IS the window system!
> 
> Having done it is a proof of concept.  ;^)
> 
> 
> https://github.com/KenDickey/opensmalltalk-vm
> or just the salients in
> https://github.com/KenDickey/FBDevVM
> 
> See some notes in the top-level directories and look at 'build.linux68ARMv8/HowToBuild'.
> 
> Any help in Sqeakifying/cleaning the sources is appreciated.
> 
> I only use Arm chips. Any brave souls want to test using amd64/intel?
> 
> Enjoy!
> -KenD
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