I and others have compiled the Squeak VM for the IT and it works fine. However that's about as far as anyone seems to have gone except for a few individuals who have worked solely within Squeak to overcome the most immediate problems (namely RMB and text input issues). I hope sometime to look in detail at hildon-ising the VM *and* at what mods can be made to a Squeak image to make it more IT-friendly.

I don't know the reasons for the choices made by OLPC but I suspect they were the most practical for achieving their objects. Maybe the number of developers and/or popularity were major factors in which case the decision to use Python was a good one IMHO. In fact I plan to use Python myself to investigate the various API's before attempting any Squeak VM integration. For me at least there is no "Python vs Squeak" issue (if anything it would be "Python vs Smalltalk") because the comparison would be ignoring Squeaks strong points such as Morphic and EToys (note there *is* EToys (ie, Squeak) for Sugar).