Downloading the Squeak VM
I wanted to download a the latest Squeak Mac virtual machine from ftp://ftp.smalltalkconsulting.com. I knew that I had to connect as a guest via FTP, but it took a while for me to figure out how to accomplish this (seemingly simple) task.
From what I gathered from forums, Finder is not a good option to get files via FTP (although there seem to be workarounds). When I tried Terminal, I kept getting a mysterious error (are there any other kinds with computers, lol): “bind: Invalid command `rl_complete’.” In addition to being totally useless in telling me what was going on, there wasn’t any info online. Thanks to the fickle gods, the error disappeared just as mysteriously. The command ended up being:
ftp -a smalltalkconsulting.com
or
ftp anonymous@smalltalkconsulting.com
With the second option, you enter your email address when prompted for a password (this seems to happen automatically with the first one).
The remaining steps were (at the ftp command prompt):
- binary
- get “Squeak 4.2.5beta1U.app.zip”
And that was that, the file was downloaded into my home directory!