The Ubuntu Scratch Page

What is Scratch? Scratch is a graphical programming language created by people at the MIT media lab. It is designed to teach programming concepts in a graphical setting. It is freely available for Mac and Windoze. Their site has complete instructions for these platforms. This page shows how to install it on Ubuntu Linux as well.

Important! Make sure you have visited the page sources.php linked at the left and carry out its instructions. This will ensure that you can easily download all you need for your Ubuntu distro at NCSSM.

Get ScratchThis is the Scratch Page at MIT. Sign up and get scratch for Mac or Doze here. These are simple installs. Below I show how to make it work on an Ubuntu box. My box is a Stinkpad T60p running Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin).

Scratch for UbuntuFollow these steps to get Scratch running on your Ubuntu box. First you will install some packages. If you have trouble with the repositories, my sources.list is shown below.

It is nice to have the docs if you want to play with smalltalk.
  • Next, get the squeak packages; there are four of them
  • Now download the .zip archive for Windoze, not the .exe file.
  • Use the archive manager to extract the .zip file.
  • To start scrach, type
    
    $ squeak pathToScrach
    
    
    at the command line and scratch should launch.