Second Life, Linux and Wine

[Stephan Gaudio]

I am using 64 bit Linux Mint. The most recent Second Life viewer is not working for me. It crashes right when I start it. There is a bug report in the Jira, so I suppose I am not the only one. The Lindens basically broke the Linux Viewer completely and are not willing to fix it. So in my last attempt to somehow keep SL running and not canceling my account and having to close my business that I built in so many years, today I installed Wine and hoped that it would work with SL.

I installed the main Wine package, then downloaded the Windows version of SL, right clicked it to install and it looked great. The install dialog popped up and it installed, but at the end just an empty frame showed and it was stuck. I closed it, restarted the computer but still just an empty frame. SL is not starting. Does anybody know whether I did something wrong? Maybe a problem because I try to run a 32 bit SL on a 64 bit machine? Do I need to install more packages? What would be the alternative? A Virtual Machine? Please help! I do not want to leave SL after 8 years, but I will also never install Windows!

[dd Temin]

Download the 64 bit version of  Singularity viewer  (64 bit Linux version)

http://www.singularityviewer.org/downloads

This works fine on my Chromebook with Linux operationg system installed.

dd

 

[Stephan Gaudio]

Yes, I know. Firestorm works too currently, but I always used the official viewer (I know, I am the only one in SL;) and I am so used to it. Also I think long term the 3rd party viewers will break too for Linux when they take over the code from LL. So I am looking for a long term solution. My favorite would be using Wine, but I don't why it would not work.

[Nalates Urriah]

Long term WINE will likely be a good way to go.

Third party Linux viewers will probably be around and work well enough for some time, if not indefinitely. I've been told the Lab has been running behind third party linux viewer devs for a time now. So, I'm not sure the change at the Lab is going to make a big difference to Linux devs.

But, I would look to having 2 viewers installed. If an update kills one, you have an alternate as a backup.

[Jean Horten]

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Stephan Gaudio wrote:

I am using 64 bit Linux Mint. The most recent Second Life viewer is not working for me. It crashes right when I start it. There is a bug report in the Jira, so I suppose I am not the only one. The Lindens basically broke the Linux Viewer completely and are not willing to fix it. So in my last attempt to somehow keep SL running and not canceling my account and having to close my business that I built in so many years, today I installed Wine and hoped that it would work with SL.

I installed the main Wine package, then downloaded the Windows version of SL, right clicked it to install and it looked great. The install dialog popped up and it installed, but at the end just an empty frame showed and it was stuck. I closed it, restarted the computer but still just an empty frame. SL is not starting. Does anybody know whether I did something wrong? Maybe a problem because I try to run a 32 bit SL on a 64 bit machine? Do I need to install more packages? What would be the alternative? A Virtual Machine? Please help! I do not want to leave SL after 8 years, but I will also never install Windows!

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You basically are installing some kind of windows when installing wine.

There are different 64 bit Linux viewers available, Singularity and Kokua, both have been working very well on my 64 bit linux systems for quite a while, there is not only no need to reduce viewer performance by chosing  the very suboptimal solution of running a windows executable under wine, imho is's complete nonsense to run a windows viewer if there are good working native 64 bit linux viewers around.

My favourite is singularity, as I prefer the old style V1 user interface, if you like the new V3 UI better, just try Kokua.

J.

[Nova Convair]

Kokua, Firestorm and Singularity have a 64 bit Linux version and run fine under Mint. At least with the non free Nvidia drivers. (I never tried Ati)

I never wasted my time trying to make a LL 32 bit viewer run on a 64 bit Linux and I will never waste my time using Wine when I can run it native.

Kokua is like the LL viewer, with some extras.
Firestorm is a ton of extras with a viewer.
Singularity has the old v1 interface. I can still operate that but I don't want to.

[Stephan Gaudio]

I tried all the viewers yesterday and like Catznip most so far, because it is close to the official viewer. And finally I have music in SL again. That was not working for months now. But still I am afrait that is no long term solution. The Lindens will add new features like Experiences and those might not work in Linux.

So did anybody yet try Wine and got SL running? Or a virtual machine?

[Jean Horten]

I tried SL once on wine (2nd gen i/ CPU, Nvidia GTX 570 GPU, 16 Gb ram) and it was a quite unpleasant experience  due to graphics perfomance problems.

The VM  "gpu" is no abe to handle viewers at all, as the VM cannot use your hardware gpu at all

If you still insist on using the official client, install windows, otherwise Kokua 64 bit Linux (latest release April 23rd, 2015) might be your viewer, as it uses a very similar ui like the official viewer and is much more up to date than the 32 bit  catznip (latest relase May 9th, 2014).

All tpv devs are implementing new offcial viewer functionality constantly to their viewers, so your fear of not being able to use a linux viewer with the latest technology might not be appropriate, especally when using a viewer that was released 13 months ago

 

J.

[Stephan Gaudio]

Ok, I did not see that. I thought it was May 2015. I switched to Kokua now. Looks great.