HOWTO: Installing Second Life viewer 3.8.7 under Linux Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit

[TooEasilyDistracted]

Installing Second Life viewer 3.8.7 under Linux 64-bit
------------------------------------------------------
I'm running Linux Ubuntu 14.04.03 LTS Trusty Tahr 64-bit.  My goal is to run the official SL viewer with working ambient sound and voice chat.

To run a 32-bit executable file like SecondLife on a 64-bit multi-architecture Ubuntu system, you have to add the i386 architecture and install the three library packages libc6:i386, libncurses5:i386, and libstdc++6:i386.  In terminal:
 sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
 sudo apt-get update
 sudo apt-get install libc6:i386 libncurses5:i386 libstdc++6:i386
After these steps, you should be able to run a 32-bit application, for example:
./secondlife

In December 2015, SL viewer version 4 arrived.  It is not fully compatible with Linux per the Release Notes; it uses the CEF media plugin that is Windows-only.  I recommend version 3.8.7.308556 released 12/03/2015 (03 Dec 2015) as fine for Linux, its download is available on the secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/3.8.7.308556 page.

Pick a good location within your home space for the application and extract the download into it.  It will create a directory for the contents there.  In a terminal, you can make that directory your default
 cd /home/[user]/[applicationdir]/Second_Life_3_8_7_308556_i686
Then ./secondlife should launch the program.

The first place you want to go is Me / Preferences / Setup and in the Software updates section, tell it "I will download and install updates manually".  Be sure to click OK.  This will prevent it from auto-updating to the incompatible version 4.

Optionally, right-click the icon in the Launcher bar and Lock to launcher for convenient startup.

Voice chat will be broken, so don't try it.  Note whether you have ambient sound, like water sounds and birds chirping.  Me / Exit Second Life or Ctrl-Q to Log out.

     -     -     Fixing ambient sound     -     -

If you have no ambient sound, from the Ubuntu Software Center, install
 libopenal1
the OpenAL API shared library.  We need to manually connect openal modules as SL resources.

Open a terminal.
Make your SL directory the default, for example:
 cd /home/[user]/[applicationdir]/Second_Life_3_8_7_308556_i686
Move into the library subdirectory:
 cd lib
The prompt now looks something like
/home/[user]/[applicationdir]/Second_Life_3_8_7_308556_i686/lib$

Look at the libopenal files to check version numbers
 ls  -al libopenal*
Will give you a list of SL modules like this:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 ckh ckh     14 Dec  6 11:22 libopenal.so -> libopenal.so.1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 ckh ckh     21 Dec  6 11:22 libopenal.so.1 -> libopenal.so.1.12.854
-rwxr-xr-x 1 ckh ckh 346276 Dec 15 17:16 libopenal.so.1.12.854

 ls -al /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libopenal.so.1*
Will give you a list of Ubuntu modules like this:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root     19 Jun 20  2012 /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libopenal.so.1 -> libopenal.so.1.14.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 346276 Jun 20  2012 /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libopenal.so.1.14.0

Copy these newer Ubuntu version files to the SL library directory
 cp /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libopenal.so.1* ./
Remove the old link to the old version
 rm libopenal.so.1
And create the new link to the new version
 ln -s libopenal.so.1.14.0 libopenal.so.1

Check your work - is the new version linked to by libopenal.so.1?
 ls  -al libopenal*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 ckh ckh     14 Dec  6 11:22 libopenal.so -> libopenal.so.1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 ckh ckh     21 Dec  6 11:22 libopenal.so.1 -> libopenal.so.1.14.0
-rwxr-xr-x 1 ckh ckh 346276 Dec 15 17:16 libopenal.so.1.12.854
-rw-r--r-- 1 ckh ckh 346276 Dec 15 17:16 libopenal.so.1.14.0

Second Life should now have ambient sound.  It worked for me.

     -     -     Fixing voice chat     -     -

A symptom of the voice chat problem that I fix in this section is that Me / Preferences / Sound & Media / Input/Output devices opens with Default greyed out and My volume non-functional and an eternal "Please wait".

If you run SecondLife from the terminal, the terminal will have useful processing messages visible.  Here's a sample of messages from the voice chat problem:

2015-12-28T01:24:20Z INFO: LLProcess::LLProcess: SLVoice (4841): launched cd /home/ckh/CKHapps/Second_Life_3_8_7_308556_i686: /home/ckh/CKHapps/Second_Life_3_8_7_308556_i686/bin/SLVoice -ll 0 -lf /home/ckh/.secondlife/logs/ -st 5
/home/ckh/CKHapps/Second_Life_3_8_7_308556_i686/bin/SLVoice: symbol lookup error: /home/ckh/CKHapps/Second_Life_3_8_7_308556_i686/bin/../lib/libvivoxsdk.so: undefined symbol: alcGetMixedBuffer
2015-12-28T01:24:20Z INFO: LLProcess::handle_status: SLVoice (4841) exited with code -1
2015-12-28T01:24:21Z WARNING: ll_apr_warn_status: APR: Connection refused
2015-12-28T01:24:22Z WARNING: ll_apr_warn_status: APR: Connection refused

In these instructions, when I say your SL directory, I mean something like
/home/[user]/[applicationdir]/Second_Life_3_8_7_308556_i686
In the sample messages above, its
/home/ckh/CKHapps/Second_Life_3_8_7_308556_i686

The third party viewer Phoenix Firestorm uses a lot of the same libraries as the regular SecondLife viewer.  Their wonderful team analyzed this problem in their viewer, and they prepared a fix for Firestorm that works in the SL viewer, too.  In your browser, enter this URL and download the file:
http://downloads.phoenixviewer.com/slvoice-3.2.0002.10426.298329-linux-20150809.tar.bz2

Ask your browser to show the file in its folder, or in Files, find it.  Right-click it and Open with Archive Manager.  Double-click the lib folder to open it.  Double-click the release folder to open it.

Left-click to highlight SLVoice, then right-click it and choose Extract.  Browse to your SL/bin directory (you will see a SLVoice already there) and click the Extract button.  Confirm that you want to replace the old file.  At the "Extraction completed successfully" message, click Close.

In the Archive Manager list again, highlight everything *except* SLVoice and ca-bundle.crt (which is not needed).  Extract those to SL/lib.  Give permission to replace.

Second Life should now have working voice chat.  It worked for me.

Voice Echo Canyon is a special SL location to test voice chat.  When you are there, and when your voice chat is enabled, your microphone input will echo back to you with a brief delay.

     -     -     Tech Tip     -     -

The PulseAudio Volume Control, available from the Ubuntu Software Center (pavucontrol 2.0-2) is nifty for seeing what audio streams are happening.  I read it can also help if you have more than one sound processor in your system.  For example, one onboard the motherboard, plus a separate card in a slot.

EOF.