Second Life updater fails on Linux under Wine - cause found

[animats]

Of interest only to Linux users.

Although the Second Life viewers aren't supported under Wine (a program for running Windows programs) on Linux, they do work. Except for the SL version checker, a Python program which checks whether an updated viewer is available. That crashes. JIRA was rejected as Linux is not supported. I got the error while running the puppetry project viewer under Wine on Linux. It works. Got a Python traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "SLVersionChecker.py", line 651, in <module>
  File "SLVersionChecker.py", line 647, in main
  File "SLVersionChecker.py", line 136, in leap
  File "SLVersionChecker.py", line 257, in leap_body
  File "util.py", line 88, in wrapper
  File "update_manager.py", line 625, in choose_update
  File "update_manager.py", line 476, in isUnsupported
  File "update_manager.py", line 316, in wmic
  File "update_manager.py", line 338, in _wmic
  File "subprocess.py", line 411, in check_output
  File "subprocess.py", line 491, in run
  File "subprocess.py", line 1024, in communicate
  File "subprocess.py", line 1416, in _communicate
IndexError: list index out of range

Turns out it's a known bug in the Python subprocess module. Upgrading to a current version of Python should fix it. I need to upgrade the machine which is still running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

The Wine people try really hard to make anything that looks like a game work. I normally run Firestorm for Linux, but now and then there's some need to run the LL viewer.

[Henri Beauchamp]

1.- You could run natively, under Linux, a viewer with puppetry support. Namely the Cool VL Viewer v1.30.1 experimental branch. Running a viewer under Linux+Wine leads to a massive performance loss...

2.- It is indeed sometimes useful for me to run LL's RC viewers under Wine (this helps in backporting new features since I develop my viewer under Linux), but I have no trouble doing so without bothering with Python stuff. Just delete the version checker executable from the viewer installation directory (the viewer will also likely crash on exit, so better deleting the bugsplat reporter executable as well, since LL cannot care less about Linux+Wine).

3.- Wine people do not seem too eager to fix some bugs when they affect SL; I already have reported a couple that do affect the viewer, but without any result on the bugfix front... One bug is a bad file pointer position reporting on writes without a flush; it is automatically worked around by the Cool VL Viewer which is capable of detecting when it runs under Wine. Another affects boost libraries from v1.79 onward, and it lead me to keep v1.78 for my viewer Windows builds so far (Linux and macOS can enjoy the latest boost libraries); since LL's viewers are still using boost v1.78 as well, they are for now not affected either, but as soon as LL will update boost, LLDiriterator will break (and this cannot be worked around), meaning you won't be able to run the viewer any more under Wine...

 

Edited October 28, 2022 by Henri Beauchamp

[Henri Beauchamp]

On 10/28/2022 at 6:02 PM, Henri Beauchamp said:

Another affects boost libraries from v1.79 onward, and it lead me to keep v1.78 for my viewer Windows builds so far (Linux and macOS can enjoy the latest boost libraries); since LL's viewers are still using boost v1.78 as well, they are for now not affected either, but as soon as LL will update boost, LLDiriterator will break (and this cannot be worked around), meaning you won't be able to run the viewer any more under Wine...

Good news !

This bug got (finally) fixed in Wine v7.20 (tested with a Cool VL Viewer binary linked against boost v1.80).