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Currently, I want to learn Smalltalk to understand more about object oriented programming, and I have spent quite some time to find the tutorials to learn it. Finally, I decided to go with Squeak. I downloaded the all in one package 64 bit at the website http://squeak.org/. Then, run it. The thing is it launches, but I can't find a menu at all. I just can see the options like: about Squeak, hide others, hide squeak, and quit squeak. Moreover, I can't even quit the application, it just hangs there. I have been searching and know that the reason is because I've updated my Mac OS to Sierra, and trying to find a way to make it work, but haven't got any real result so far. I really wanna learn this great programming language. My ultimate goal is I wanna follow the tutorial here http://squeak.preeminent.org/tut2007/html/ after understanding the basic foundation of Smalltalk. Therefore, it would be great if anybody can help me here.

cigien
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Fatima
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3 Answers3

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The problem has been brought up on the squeak-dev mailing list some time ago and the accepted solution there [1] was to run the Squeak image with a more recent (but possibly less stable) version of the Virtual Machine. Automatically built VMs can be downloaded at https://bintray.com/opensmalltalk/vm/cog/. The specific version pointed out in the thread on the mailing list is no longer available, so you should try another one that comes after 201610042023.

[1] http://forum.world.st/Squeak-Does-Not-Run-on-MAC-OS-Sierra-tp4918570p4918576.html

For reference, this issue in OpenSmalltalk VM on GitHub: https://github.com/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm/issues/39

JayK
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  • Thank you for your great help. I've just visited all the above links, and I am wondering how can I install Squeak by VM. So, I just downloaded the file, unzip, and run like normal? – Fatima Dec 31 '16 at 02:11
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    Yes. The "one-click" package simply bundles the image and the VM. – Max Leske Dec 31 '16 at 10:01
  • Thank you very much. Happy new year to you. I wish you a new year with great happiness and successes. Stackoverflow is such an amazing source of knowledge. At least, I still have sth to believe in this chaotic world these days. ;) – Fatima Jan 02 '17 at 05:51
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In MacOS Sierra, Apple decided to break some APIs and wrote a bad release document describing that they did so. As a result our current VMs broke and we found out during the beta. As a result of the bad documentation it took some time to find and then fix the problem. The new vms are fixed.

Stephan Eggermont
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  • Thanks for sharing. I appreciate it. Happy new year to you. ;) – Fatima Jan 02 '17 at 05:52
  • I just downloaded version 5.1 from squeak.org for macOS and when I run it, I get this goofy message about "Squeak cannot write to the changes file named /private/var/folders/s3/blah-blah-blah.changes". This shouldn't be happening!!! (If I move it to Applications folder, then it works fine.) – Richard Eng Jul 09 '17 at 23:28
  • Another case of Apple handling change badly. Instead of clearly announcing they would no longer allow downloaded applications to write in place in a future release, so we would have the time to make fixes, they just broke existing behaviour. We'll fix it sometime – Stephan Eggermont Aug 11 '17 at 07:15
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The issue raised by @Richard Eng still seems to persist in Squeak5.3. I do have a working 5.3 image and VM but now forget how I got it to work.

hebbarp
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