TechgnosisWeb Prime

Well, I seem to remember rambling on about trying to get Second Life, that Metaverse-esque online game, to run under Linux by using Wine or WineX. And the conclusion on those ramblings was that, no, it would not run. So while Natalie’s been engrossed in the game on her Windows box, I’ve done without it over on mine. Until now. With Natalie’s box being dead and in need of replacement parts, I had to find a way for her to play SL on my machine. I looked for ways but didn’t find anything too worthwhile, and was starting to be resigned to the fact that I would probably have to install Windows on a separate partition and dual-boot between Win and Lin so she could play, which would have meant that this site, along with my other sites and their respective emails, would have been down completely while she was playing. But then I ran across an interesting forum thread where someone claimed to have gotten SL working under Linux.

I followed the thread, and it turns out that SL runs almost flawlessly under Linux, but you have to do some very minor source code hacking on WineX in order to get it working. WineX is usually available only as a prepackaed binary, which means, no source code, just running program. These prepackaged binaries can’t run SL. However, WineX is also available thoruhg CVS (Concurrent Versioning System), which does give you access to a large chunk of the source code, which you can compile for yourself if you’re so inclined. So, you download the source code for WineX and you change one single line in one of the source files, and then compile WineX, which takes a short while. And then you use this hacked version of WineX to install and run SL, and shazam, it just works! In fact, it seems to work a tad faster than it did on Natalie’s old box (although that could be related to the fact that my box is simply a lot more powerful than hers used to be). I created an account for myself (we used to share an account, but that old account is Natalie’s by now, I really wouldn’t feel comfortable stepping into her skin like that, as it were), and spent some time today just goofing about and exploring. Good stuff. There are some minor glitches, but the folks in the forums over at SL seem to be working on workarounds for all of them, and in the meantime, until Linden Labs releases an official Linux client, this is good enough for now.