So I installed Squeak, on my windows XP system to dabble in Smalltalk again. This means the administrator seems to be the only user able to use the programming environment. This was not satisfactory to me, as I would like to access it from any of my other accounts including a limited access account that I use daily because I used the restrictions in my favor and use Run As when I want to officially install something new. Also, I have other accounts where I like to access the environment. With this in mind I also wanted each account to access it own squeak image.
To solve this, I had to do some manual reconfiguration of Squeak on my system and I am posting this for anyone who dabbles in Squeak on multiple user accounts on a windows machine, as it is easily modifiable to work on any version of Windows.
Step 1: Move the squeak application folder to somewhere all users can access it, either in “All Users” or “Program Files“, this will ensure that accounts that are not allowed to view a particular account such as the Administrator, can access the executables.
Step 2: Create a work folder for each user for squeak, for example. “My Documents\Squeak” and in them put the squeak .image .change and .sources files.
Step 3: To get it all working together, you need to create a new lnk in your start menu. To be precise this would be in the start menu for All Users. The link should target to the squeak .exe file that you moved in Step 1. The working folder, or start up folder however should be modified to something like “%HOMEPATH%\My Documents\Squeak“. This will ensure that the program will find the local .image .change and .sources files for that account.
Step 4: Modify the properties of the .exe for squeak and the .lnk file to allow them to be used by non administrators. This is an important step if using a limited account to run squeak as even if the link was in the start menu, it would not run with that user unless he was allowed to use it. You will find this option in the Compatibility tab.
That’s it. Now you can use Squeak on any user account and independently of any other user on the same machine.
If you like all users to use the same .image .change and .sources files, you need to put them and reference that folder, where all users can access and modify the files. Such as a shared folder.