Hi all, I've been having trouble getting *any* sort of Smalltalk working on Linux. But ultimately I got Pharo (my first choice) working on Debian Jessie.
It wasn't terribly hard in the end, but since the instructions at http://pharo.org/gnu-linux-installation#64-bit-System-Setup seem to be out of date, I thought it might be helpful to post something in case those in charge of that page would like to update. Since there is no issue tracker, I assume this is a good a place as any. ## Short Version ## * sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 * sudo apt-get update * sudo apt-get install lib32zl lib32ncurses5 Note that there is no ia32-libs package on Jessie, as far as I can tell. (I have no idea whether you actually need to install lib32ncurses5, but those were what apt-get suggested, and it worked.) I do have a startup error -- "MessageNotUnderstood: EmbeddedFreeTypeFontInstaller>>failedToOpen:Index:" -- but it doesn't seem to break anything. ## Longer version / Rant ## Pharo turned out to be impossible on my netbook (where I would like to use it, sadly) because it is still running Crunchbang, which is Debian Woody under the hood. So in theory the fix from the 64bit install page should work. It doesn't, though -- some sort of problem with #! I suppose "The following packages have unmet dependacies: ia32-libs: Depends: ia32-libs-i386" Squeak, as downloaded from their site, has exactly the same problem. Pharo isn't in the Debian Repository, but an old version of the Squeak VM -- *just* the VM -- is. (Not sure what the point of that is.) It doesn't work with the current Squeak image from the website. I did eventually manage to get a compatible image ... via FTP. Good grief. (Good enough to learn the ropes, I suppose.) I really didn't want to go the Gnu Smalltalk road, but in desperation I tried it. Under both Crunchbang and Debian Jessie, the gst-browser package falls over immediately when you start it, a great big error trace I won't bother to paste here. These are packages in the *repository*. Is no-one maintaining them? The point of this rant is to give context to the following: thank you. Really, thank you, to the folks behind Pharo and everyone reading this. This is the problem with FOSS: blink, and yesterday's rave technology is gone. And Smalltalk is *important* -- I'm not a Smalltalk programmer, but every time I play with it I learn so much about OOP, programming, and good design of classes. And I keep coming back to try to work with it again, because it offers things I want and just can't get elsewhere. The idea that Smalltalk might one day just ... not run? Not worth thinking about. Okay, broke a cardinal rule here. Apologies for joining a mailing list and then immediately posting a long rant. Going to Lurk Mode now! Shadow.
