Second Life in a Sierra VM - installs but "quits unexpectedly"

[Tid Kidd]

Hi

I just downloaded the SL Viewer in my Sierra (OS X 10.12) Parallels VM to get round the host OS 10.9.5 running SL without the media_plugin_cef so some things are blank.

However, the Viewer “quits unexpectedly” after a few seconds of a blank window, and I never get to a login screen.

Does SL not run in a virtual machine?

(Firewall is off. Machine is 2011 iMac, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD)

[Fritigern Gothly]

Forget the system requirements that are listed on https://secondlife.com/my/support/system-requirements/ because that page is always terribly out of date. Look for example at the recommended graphics cards which are all too old to even consider running your desktop on, let alone something graphics-intensive like SL, or the RAM. 4gb? LOL! 16gb is more like it nowadays!

Why not make a copy of the VM and update to something newer, like OS X 10.15 or 11 and see if that works better?

[Tid Kidd]

I would except there are several reasons I have for running 10.9.5. BTW my machine only supports as far as 10.13.

[Fritigern Gothly]

4 hours ago, Tid Kidd said:

I would except there are several reasons I have for running 10.9.5. BTW my machine only supports as far as 10.13.

I meant make a copy of the Parallels VM that you have sierra in. Or is there a reason why higher versions of you OS will not run inside Parallels?

[Lyssa Greymoon]

If you gotta have Mavericks, maybe set up a partition for High Sierra and dual boot.

[Tid Kidd]

Unfortunately I've now discovered SL will not run AT ALL in a VM. 😒

[Fritigern Gothly]

Perhaps try a different hypervisor. Something like VirtualBox (which is free and open source from Oracle). I have ran SL in a VM in that one before both with Windows as the guest OS as well as Linux as the guest OS (the OS installed in the virtual machine). 

 

 

 

Edited May 15, 2021 by Fritigern Gothly
Turned the woth VirtualBox into a link to its website

[Henri Beauchamp]

8 hours ago, Fritigern Gothly said:

Perhaps try a different hypervisor. Something like VirtualBox (which is free and open source from Oracle).

There is no OpenGL driver for VirtualBox and macOS guests: the viewer won't run at all on such a VM. Sound is missing too.

[Tid Kidd]

8 hours ago, Fritigern Gothly said:

Perhaps try a different hypervisor. Something like VirtualBox (which is free and open source from Oracle). I have ran SL in a VM in that one before both with Windows as the guest OS as well as Linux as the guest OS (the OS installed in the virtual machine).

Yes - what Henri said (below). VMs don't use the host’s  graphics card - they simply emulate GFX and use RAM instead of the graphics card. I'm guessing that's why the Viewer quits straight away in a VM - it can't find a graphics card?

4 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

There is no OpenGL driver for VirtualBox and macOS guests: the viewer won't run at all on such a VM. Sound is missing too.

 

[animats]

23 hours ago, Tid Kidd said:

Unfortunately I've now discovered SL will not run AT ALL in a VM. 😒

Firestorm will run under Wine 3.0 on Linux. Under Wine 6.0, it crashes on teleports. So it's not inherently impossible to run SL in a somewhat virtualized environment.

[Henri Beauchamp]

4 hours ago, animats said:

Firestorm will run under Wine 3.0 on Linux. Under Wine 6.0, it crashes on teleports. So it's not inherently impossible to run SL in a somewhat virtualized environment.

64 bits viewers (at least the Cool VL Viewer and LL's viewer) run fine (albeit of course a bit slower) for me under Linux + Wine 6.6... I'm using this trick for quick tests of my viewer Windows builds, and for LL's viewer when I want to test some new feature before backporting it (since LL is not providing a Linux viewer any more). Teleports do work fine.

Linux viewers also do run (but 10 times slower than natively) in a Linux VirtualBox VM on a Linux host.

With Linux, you could also run Linux viewer under a virtualized kernel (e.g. with the Xen hypervisor) and almost at the native speed, with some tweaks for the GPU drivers...

This said, I won't recommend any of these solutions for everyday's SLing.