scratch team mailing list archive

[Amos Blanton <amos@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Kevin,

This is great! I don't have a red hat system with which to test this.

On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 1:38 AM, Kevin Somervill <ksomervi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

>
> I need a few things for the spec file, so if you could check the following.
>
> Name: scratch
> Version: 1.4.0
> Release: 1%{?dist}
> Summary: Programming system and content development tool
> Group: Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab
> License: unknown
> URL:  http://scratch.mit.edu
> Packager: Kevin Somervill <ksomervi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Source0:
> http://info.scratch.mit.edu/sites/infoscratch.media.mit.edu/files/file/scratch_1.4.0.tgz
>
> If the license field can hold non-standard text, you might add a link to:
http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Scratch_License
If not that's ok.
If Sourc0 indicates a page that should be watched for updates, it should
probably be this one:
http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Linux_Installer
Group should be: MIT Scratch Team
Summary should be: easy to use programming environment for ages 8 and up


> How attached are you to having the files in /usr/lib/scratch? These are the
> Plugins, Scratch.image, and scratch.ini files and I think they should be in
> /usr/libexec/scratch, as well as the scratch_squeak_vm.


I'm pretty sure it's fine to move these, but the final answer depends on the
way paths are coded inside the Scratch.image, about which I'm not certain. I
suspect there are absolute path references to the media / help / language
files, but probably not to the Plugins, image, and vm. So if everything
works when you set it up that way, that's proof enough. :)

The scratch script would be updated as follows:


> <quote>
> #!/bin/sh
> # Squeakvm wrapper to load Scratch image.
> #------------------------------------------------------------
>
> SCRATCH_PATH="/usr/libexec/scratch"
>
> ${SCRATCH_PATH}/App/scratch_squeak_vm \
> -plugins ${SCRATCH_PATH}/Plugins \
> -vm-sound-ALSA \
> ${SCRATCH_PATH}/Scratch.image "${@}"
> </quote>
>
> You'll notice I changed to ALSA from pulse (don't have or use pulse). I'm
> trying to figure out a way to test for pulse and use it if it's available,
> just not there yet.
>

That's great! It's fine to edit the startup script - the only thing we don't
want to change for different Linux versions is the actual squeak code that
lives in Scratch.image.

re: pulse plugin -- The ALSA plugin should work just fine on systems without
pulse, and performance should be the same, so just use it. We had to make
(or rather, we begged our friend and contributor Derek O'Connell to make for
us) the pulse plugin because the existence of pulse broke the ALSA plugin on
Ubuntu systems. So if you don't have pulse, use ALSA.


>
> I've posted an rpm to
> http://www.brokenlogo.com/downloads/scratch-1.4.0-1.i386.rpm
>
>
This is great! Thanks for your help!
Should I post it here for testing...

http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Linux_Installer

...or do you want to make changes based on above responses first? Either way
is fine. Also, I'm not as familiar with rpm based distributions these days -
which ones would you expect this package to be compatible with? Do you
happen to know if we can test this on the Fedora based OS that runs on OLPC
laptops?

Many thanks,
Amos



> It builds and installs clean on my machine (a CentOS 5.3). Give it a whirl
> if you can, or let some other folks test it.
>
> With minor tweaks (noted above) to the files in the tar package, the rpm
> builds pretty easily.
>
> Let me know what you think.
> ./ks
>
>
>
>


-- 
_____
Amos