[NSA - the spider in the NET]

It's a systematic problem: People who crave power are the ones going into politics (among other things), and that's precisely the people who should not be in politics.

Technology evolved faster than our social structures and values did. In my opinion that's a problem with unknown consequences.

[Having trouble starting SL on Ubuntu]

Not all graphics cards have drivers for Linux. First of all you DO need to find out what graphics card you have. There's more than one way to do it, here's a few. They all need to be run from a terminal:

1) Check all installed PCI bus devices:

lspci -v

Look for a section called "VGA compatible controller". I don't recall if 12.04 has the newer lspci, if it has you can get a shorter list by using

lspci -nn

 ...which in my case tells me this right now:

02:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GF108 [GeForce GT 440] [10de:0de0] (rev a1)

 Jenni

[Glass is coming...]

Even better: It's now possible to create reasonably realistic water. No idea what this does to performace, but it certainly looks pretty cool. Basically, a few layers of moving 60% transparent water texture, offset ~40 degrees from each other, ~5cm Z offset per layer, glossiness 255, ambient 0, default bump texture. SLURL to the place (not mine, I just consult at times): http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Kakapo/90/213/128

[NSA - the spider in the NET]

~shrug~ the only way to keep communication private is to encrypt it. Plenty of ways to do that. Of course - the mere use of encryption very likely gets you labelled "terrorist" these days and thrown in jail or worse.

Doesn't matter what country. They're all dictatorships in on way or another.

[What is the use of llTeleportAgent?]

_Supposedly_ they'll be more useful with the "Experience permission system", whenever that comes and whatever that is. I would not hold my breath if I were you.

[SL will not load on Unbubtu]

Normally when you unpack SL you can run a script in the etc directory, e.g. ./etc/register_secondlifeprotocol.sh - try that first, though you may want to reboot afterwards before tyring.

If it still does not work, here's how to fix it quite easily by hand:

1. Enter about:config in the address bar and hit enter
2. Click on "I'll be careful, I promise" (might not appear but by default it does)
3. Enter in search: network.protocol-handler
4. See if there is an entry "network.protocol-handler.external.secondlife":
   If there is, make sure it's set to "true"
   If there is not, right-click on the list of items and select New->Boolean and type in "network.protocol-handler.external.secondlife" and set the value to "true"
5. See if there's an entry "network.protocol-handler.app.secondlife":
   If there is, make sure it points to your secondlife executable binary
   If there is not, right-click on the list of items and select New->String and type in "network.protocol-handler.app.secondlife" and enter the full path to your executable (in my case e.g. "/home/jenni/Games/SecondLife-i686-Beta/secondlife")
6. Restart Firefox
7. Try a SLURL, e.g. secondlife://Dura/210/214/21 and enjoy

Hope this helps.

 

Edit: Gah, made a stupid typo

[Rod Humble interview and new Drax Files]

I'm still surprised as to the difference between Rod and his predecessor M.

Rod seems to have a genuine interest in SL and is trying to grasp how to improvie it. More to the point, he realized what a beast of a project SL is.

Mostly I agree with what he says and oddly also with the controversial points made here in this thread. Why do I agree with conflicting statements?

Because SL isn't the same for everyone who's using it. I know many creators, but I also know many who never touch the build menu.

Making SL more popular or increasing user retention isn't as easy as it sounds either. Some people just feel SL is a waste of time, or they don 't want SL, they want a first person shooter or MMO and are disappointed if they see that SL is neither of those. People leave because they move on, they get bored because "they've done it all" or they just got burned out. Many of those will blame SL for their own boredom.

Then there's the issue of more and more mobile computing. SL isn't really suited for that simply because at the current time the hardware requirements are just too high. SL suffers in that area. Sure, there's plenty of vocal people who demand that LL doesn't get new features because it increases system requirements and/or increases the learning curve for creators. Yet SL is still fairly far behind in tech. When it launched in 2003 it was technologically outdated. It stillis outdated, despite mesh and materials having made huge strides to getting it at least to the level of tech 7 years ago. That too drives people away. They log on to SL and go "WTF is this fugly laggy game?"

Whether people think SL is a game or not is irrelevant. First impressions count. My first visit was extremely brief: Loaded the client, laughed my head off about the pathetic graphics and ludicrous UI (sometime between 2003 and 2005, forgot exactly when), deleted the client after 5 minutes of trying to figure out what to do. If it wasn't for a RL friend _and_ work demanding a look I'd never have given it a second chance, years later.

I know what my dream SL would look like but that's not going to happen anytime soon. The tech isn't _quite_ there yet and neither is anyone with the imagination and drive to get it done.

[Physical objects escaping from parcel / region]

Not with physics per se, but I've had a few issues with somewhat odd script errors on sim restarts. The pathfinding critters froze once or twice.

[Requesting connection of two linden waterways? How?]

Un?)fortunately I'm not at all involved in anything Linden. All I am is a paying customer and rarely beta tester who usually is at work when the Lindens have their meetings.

[Requesting connection of two linden waterways? How?]

That's exactly who I blame And it's not just those two sims either. They did create a few channels and such, some of which inexplicably fizzle out along the way.

The owners have every right to be as assinine as they darn well please, they pay the tier, they can ban and block everything and everyone for any reason whatsoever.

Bad planning. I'd like to think they're going to fix it someday, but I'm not holding my breath.

[Requesting connection of two linden waterways? How?]

To be honest I never followed up with LL on this. I can't say I have any faith in LL to do anything about this, thus I didn't want to waste my time.

As far as I can see the only sensibe way to resolve the issue would be to add linden water sims from Gubbio east, past Valgerd, then down to Soncino - 5 sims all in all, one physical server at most. Anything else would mean repossessing some land which I can't see happening anytime soon.

And you're right, thanks to the silly security orb it's now impassable.

[How can i install the SL in the linux OS of ubuntu.]

If I may make a suggestion? Try and find someone you trust who is willing to (locally or remotely) hop onto your PC and fix it for you. It can be done remotely via SSH,NX or VNC if need be.

You're missing the required proprietary graphics drivers for SL and I highly suspect there's a boatload of other issues with your installation. Trying to fix this via forum isn't going to work well, as you're already noticing I think.

[How can i install the SL in the linux OS of ubuntu.]

Actually, this error tells me your Linux install is broken anyway:

dpkg: error processing libreoffice-writer (--configure): package libreoffice-writer is not ready for configuration cannot configure (current status `half-installed')

 You may be able to fix it with

apt-get -f install

 

[How can i install the SL in the linux OS of ubuntu.]

Okay, that is definitely different than opening the file...

./secondlife: line 154: bin/do-not-directly-run-secondlife-bin: No such file or directory

That error message indicates that you either got a corrupted download or a borked archive extraction. Let's just go back to the beginning... Open a terminal window (anywhere), and execute the following commands, in order. This should hopefully get you going regardless of what else is going on. It's way more complicated than it needs to be, but it should cover most bases.

# This next command will ask for your password to install wget and the 32bit libraries needed for SL.

# Beware, this might take a while if the 32bit libraries aren't already installed.

sudo apt-get install wget ia32-libs-multiarch


# This command is just to make sure we're in your home directory and not somewhere else on the file system

cd ~


# Make sure we have a clean environment

rm -r SecondLife-i686-3.5.2.276129

rm SecondLife-i686-3.5.2.276129.tar.bz2


# Fetch the archive from LLs servers

wget http://download.cloud.secondlife.com/Viewer-3/SecondLife-i686-3.5.2.276129.tar.bz2


# Extract the archive (might take a moment)

tar xfj SecondLife-i686-3.5.2.276129.tar.bz2


# Try to launch it

cd SecondLife-i686-3.5.2.276129

./secondlife

Let's see where that gets you.

 

[How can i install the SL in the linux OS of ubuntu.]

That can't be. Are you doing these steps EXACTLY as written? And I mean TO THE LETTER, EXACTLY as written? Here's the step-by-step for KDE, it should be pretty much the same in Gnome/Unity or whatever DE you use.

1. Go to https://secondlife.com/support/downloads/ and click on the big "Download the SL Viewer on Linux"
2. SAVE the file, DO NOT OPEN IT
3. Go to the location where the file was saved. Usually that's the "Downloads" folder.
4. Right-click on the file, choose Extract->Extract Archive Here, Autodetect Subfolder (takes a moment to complete)
5. Look for a newly created folder called "SecondLife-i686-3.5.2.276129" (as of today that's the current viewer) and open that folder
6. Double-click on the file secondlife

If that opens a text file, you haven't followed these steps. If nothing happens you're likely missing some dependencies.

To figure out which dependencies are missing, right-click somewhere in the folder where Second Life got extracted and choose Actions->Open Terminal Here

In the black terminal window, execute the following command and paste the output here in this thread:

./secondlife

[How can i install the SL in the linux OS of ubuntu.]

Sorry... you'll need someone more familiar with Ubuntu to figure that one out. I'm a Kubuntu (KDE) gal.

[How can i install the SL in the linux OS of ubuntu.]

You don't right-click on the secondlife icon... you left-click or double-click on it (depending on your configuration).

[How can i install the SL in the linux OS of ubuntu.]

For some reason you seem to have changed the default action from "Run" to "open with whatever text editor". The "secondlife" file is an executable.

Since I don't use Ubuntu I'll have to leave this one to someone familiar with Gnome/Unity/Whatever.

[How can i install the SL in the linux OS of ubuntu.]

Diamond icon? What diamond icon?

The steps to install Second Life under Ubuntu are like this:

1) Download the Viewer from here: https://secondlife.com/support/downloads/

2) Extract the archive to someplace you can remember (if you do not know how to extract an archive under Ubuntu: Right-click on the archive, select "Extract here")

3) The extracted viewer will now be in a subdirectory called "SecondLife-i686-[version]". Go into that folder.

3a) If you just want to run it: click on the file called "secondlife". Second Life will automatically be installed in your Ubuntu menu under "Internet".

3b) If you want to install it "properly", click on the file called "install.sh". This will install Second Life in a folder in your home directory and also create a lauch icon under the "Internet" menu.

Btw, the icon isn't a diamond. It's a green hand on black background.

Caveats:
* If you're on 64bit, you'll need to install the package "ia32-libs-multiarch". That gets most of SL working.
* If you're using a nVidia or ATI graphics card you need to install the proprietary drivers for those.

[Deploys for the week of 2013-05-13 (Updated at 2013-05-14 14:45PDT)]

Oki thanks. I'll just chomp on the bit in the meantime As a horse, I'm used to doing that after all.

[Deploys for the week of 2013-05-13 (Updated at 2013-05-14 14:45PDT)]

Unfortunately that old page answers pretty much not a single question - all buzzwords and no content. I had hoped for a little more substance to be honest. After all, llTeleportAgent is still crippled, as are all the new shiny tools that preview so expansively promised.

[Deploys for the week of 2013-05-13 (Updated at 2013-05-14 14:45PDT)]

Is there _any_ way to get at least some idea what that mysterious Experience Permissions Project is?

[Is it like this everywhere in SL?]

To add to the "RP" comment... most of the time I'm a horse in SL. I don't RP a horse (aside from jest). SL is many different things for many different people. For some people with disabilities it's a way to socialize without the common awkward moments that occur all too often in RL. For others like me it's a pretense of social life - for various reasons (anything from phobias to work to feeling more comfy in SL than RL). None of those would say they RP in SL.

As for finding places... one possible way is to use the destination guide, or flat out look at the front page of the viewer (unless you use some third party viewer which elects to not display that page). Try searching for things that interest you and go wandering around. SL is a big place. And a very empty place too. There are places that are busy almost 24/7, others are only busy at certain times of the day or at special events.

Then of course there's the possibility that SL is just for you - that it holds nothing you find interesting or worthwhile.

[Help! I can't login to Second Life]

Speed is fine. Try connecting directly, i.e. NOT wireless.

[Help! I can't login to Second Life]

Okay, that message indicates you DO connect and it boots you off soon after - I think.

The most common issue there is network failure. If you're on wireless, switch to wired for testing if you can. If you're on a wired connection... well, without any information, there's a shot in the dark. From a command prompt (windows) run this command:

ping -n 50 216.82.50.46

At the end it should give you a statistic about sent/lost packets. There should be absolutely none lost. If that succeeds, try running a variation of that command:

ping -n 50 -l 1000 216.82.50.46

That, too, should not have any packets lost.

If both tests succeed and have no package loss, your network connection is ok. If either of those two have lost packets, you need to troubleshoot your Internet connection.

A slow connections shouldn't disconnect you, though it certainly would cause problems. If you think that might be an issue try running this speed test here: http://www.speedtest.net/ (this service is not affiliated with Second Life).

If your Internet connection passes this simple test, try deleting the Second Life client - whichever one you use - and afterwards delete all Second Life settings/cache files. Then reinstall Second Life and see if that changed anything.

And again, please post the output of Help->About Second Life from the client. Some basic information about your Internet connection would also be helpful: Type? DSL, Cable... something else? Do you connect through a wireless network or a wired network?