I agree. I'm doing the same course and because I couldn't get their implementation of Scheme(ucb-scheme) to work, I'm really out-of-sync with the course.
Are you taking 61as, the self-paced version? I was under the impression they were either already using, or planning to switch to, a JavaScript Scheme implementation to ease just this sort of problem.
I know one of he people who is running 61as, and I believe he wants to move as much as possible into the browser. In fact, they might even use a JavaScript-based Emacs clone instead of Emacs proper next time.
I think using the browser should make setting up the environment much easier than using some old, unsupported Scheme implementation!
I'll need to check out the Javascript based implementation sometime. But it is really annoying that the course is using something that hasn't been updated in ages.
In that case, I think that's what they're going to be working on over winter break for the next iteration of the class. At the very least, I'm sure it's a possiblity; there's obviously no guarantee that it is practical or will get done.
I think it's a good idea, personally. It could also make many of the assignments more interactive.
Are you having trouble because you're running a different platform that they developed their implementation on?
If so my way of dealing with this when I'm too lazy to deal with trying to get stuff to work on another system, is to using something like Virtual Box and work on the exact OS the library/language I want to work with was made for.
No, I'm using Linux(Arch) so I guess I am on an intended platform. It is on the user contributed repos but the installation didn't work. I tried installing just stk-scheme too but that didn't work either.
I'm doing the examples and exercises in Racket.