Re: alive?

[Stefan Rieken <StefanRieken@SoftHome.net> writes:]

>1. Alive? That the copyright notice didn't include 1999 was the first
>sign for me that vsta might not be that alive anymore. Then Andy said
>this directly in his welcome note to the mailing list. How big is this
>scene still? How many people are there on this list? Would it be worth
>the effort if I started working on vsta (docs), or is this project
>really ending?

VSTa's a little bit alive. From the mail archives, you can see a bit of
activity--some work on DMA bounce buffers, my work getting it running under
the Bochs x86 emulator, and some kernel bug work.

>2. GUI? The Web site promises MADO. The MADO docs say that it is in
>alpha stage. Is there a way that I can use it? There is also MGR. How
>should I use this package (compile - what compiler? install - how?)?

I'd be happy to see MADO alive--I think the world at large (not just VSTa)
could use the kind of windowing system MADO would be. Most recently I saw
the Linux-on-Psion people wrestling with an appropriate, scalable GUI. The
only one I know of is Photon for QNX, but that's proprietary.

>3. Squeak! It was an awful good idea of Andy to mention that name. I
>always liked the idea of a Squeak OS. (Merely a remark than a question
>:-)

Squeak can also scale down to pretty small memory systems. Not as small as
Photon, and it doesn't have the distributed capabilities of Photon. But
it's a living program, supported by some of the best Smalltalk minds in the
world. Most of my VSTa "brain cycles" are spent trying to figure out how
you make a "real" system out of the VSTa+Squeak+? building blocks.

Better docs would be absolutely welcome in VSTa, of course!

Welcome,
Andy Valencia
Received on Fri Nov 5 08:54:13 1999