[Etoys] Slightly familiar with Squeak, confused by EToys & OLPC, Please give ne some pointers!

[Thomas Porter]

Hello!

I just got my OLPC a few days ago and am having a great deal of fun
exploring it.  EToys (or Squeak at least) is one of the more familiar
areas in the OLPC to me, but I have some real conceptual difficulties:

1. I understand Squeak uses images, so that when I 'save & quit' from
a squeak session, I am saving my current state in the images file.

2. I don't know much about EToys, but I assume there is some way to
export projects so they can be shared with other EToys users in a way
that is perhaps like filing in changesets or installing packages from
SqueakMap??

3. If I understand OLPC setup properly, the EToys image is read only,
hence the instructions in
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Smalltalk_Development_on_XO to copy the
image & changes files to a location where they can be updated.  This
is only needed for developers, or people who want access to the full
set of Squeak tools like the class browser, etc.

4. If I understand the OLPC even a little bit, Activity state is saved
in the datastore, and Activities can be resumed.

My basic question:  How do the ideas of a. Squeak images being read
only, b. EToys projects, and, c. OLPC Activities fit together?

- If I make changes to a Squeak image that would require a 'save',
would I be correct to assume that stopping and resuming my EToys
activity will NOT save these changes, but would be like starting my
Squeak session over?

- If I have multiple EToys Activities listed in my Journal, do these
represent different Squeak sessions or states, and is each independant
of the others and independantly resumeable??  To me this would involve
saving a set of image and change data somewhere for each activity, or
at least deltas against the original image & changes.  Please correct
me if I am wrong, but aren't change sets just for code changes, or can
they save what I would call IDE state like the presence and position
of workspaces, transcript windows, class browsers, etc.??

- Assuming I only have the Read Only EToys images and change files, f
I start working on a new project in EToys, or even make a change as
minor as changing the speed of the little car, are these changes saved
when I stop the EToys Activity, and if so, how?

I apologize in advance for these newbie questions, but I'm really
missing some connections here and have not found a lot on the
laptop.org wiki about the details of how EToys is implemented on the
OLPC and how it interacts with the sugar environment.

Thanks for all the hard work on the OLPC, I  think EToys really stands
out as one of the coolest apps on the OLPC.

Tom Porter