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Second Life Native Linux client Released 49

Posted by Zonk from the streaming-porn-for-everyone dept.
strredwolf writes "Linden Labs has opened up the native Linux client to all users. This is an alpha version, though -- it has a lot of bugs and many hard edges. Prelim reports on the Linux client forums include: NVidia cards are better supported over ATI; get the latest drivers working in 24/32 bit color; some file editing to tweak settings is worth it; no sound; no file uploading; no texture downloading."
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Second Life Native Linux client Released More

Second Life Native Linux client Released

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  • Lower TCO (Score:2, Funny)

    by funpet ( 836434 )
    This eliminates some of the TCO of this line of work [slashdot.org].

  • Sweet. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Max Threshold ( 540114 ) on Friday February 10, 2006 @06:24PM (#14690832)
    The only remaining reason I keep Windows around at all is for MMORPGs. Maybe now I can get rid of it.

    So... does Second Life have killing people with swords?

  • Booooring! (Score:1, Funny)

    by garrett714 ( 841216 )
    So this game is basically WoW without monsters to kill to get items to kill bigger monsters to get better items to kill bigger monsters? How can it be any fun?

    • Re:Booooring! (Score:5, Informative)

      by jandrese ( 485 ) <kensama@vt.edu> on Friday February 10, 2006 @06:42PM (#14690953) Homepage Journal
      Yes, it's exactly like WoW except that there are no monsters to kill and no crafting and no levels or xp and no storyline and no quests but with virtually limitless ability to build anything your heart desires from the ground up, including programming it and texturing it however you like. In WoW you can kill monsters to get different wearable items (armor, weapons, etc...), in Second Life you can build your own clothes (in any shape you want) from scratch. I was at a party once and the Kool-Aid man showed up. It wasn't like most games (medium sized fat avatar painted red), but was an actual pitcher with ice cubes and everything.

      In other words, it's almost nothing like WoW, except that both games are online. It's not even really a game per say, more like a toy. One of the biggest differences is that Linden Labs (who makes Second Life) actually encourages people to try to make real US dollars from stuff they do in SL. There is a built-in system for converting in-game currency into US$ and everything.

      On the other hand, if you want to see numbers fly over the heads of bad guys, then SL is definatly not the game for you. There is a little bit of PvP combat, but given the nature of the game (anybody can build anything) it's horribly unbalanced and basically nobody does it outside of limited events where the rules can be locked down some more. Actually, that is the biggest strength and biggest weakness of SL: It has almost no rules. This makes for a prolifiration of sex clubs and whatnot, but it also means peopel are free to build whatever they feel like.

  • A reply for most comments thus far: (Score:4, Informative)

    by cryptomancer ( 158526 ) on Friday February 10, 2006 @06:41PM (#14690945)
    Since people need to have an idea of what Second Life as a MMOG is, in a nutshell, it's a sandbox game. And not like early-SWG or UO where there's content and game mechanics and whatnot- there's what content other players have modeled, textured, and scripted in-game. You'll spend a lot of your time flying around a world filled with player-created sculptures and buildings, and you might even run into other players. But you'll be hard-pressed to find a 'game' to play while you're there. It's like Myst, without the puzzles or story.

    That's the objective, non-negative stuff I could say about the game. Anything else would be modded troll or flamebait.
    • My understanding of it is it's just a graphical MUSH [wikipedia.org]. The difference between Second Life and WOW is the exact difference you would find between say a DIKU mud and a tinymush or something. e.g. one is action oriented with rpg tacked on designed by implementors for players, one is all rpg where the world is defined, created, and maintained by the users/players and somewhat self-moderated by whatever currency they use to limit the creation of new in-game items.
    • It's not a game. The goal is to live there, no to play. It says so from its very name ("Second Life").
  • I'm glad they didn't bother porting Real Life to linux, I heard the sequel is so much more interesting.
  • Dude, I'm still working on the first one.

    I've looked at that game, but as far as I can tell, it's not really a game as much as a graphics creation site -- and with a rather dated graphics engine too.

    So, can someone in the know tell me if there really are gaming elements within this thing? Doesn't have to be slash 'em and loot 'em style, but any gaming element at all. Is it a moo, a mush, a rom, what?

    I'm not getting the point of this thing, in case you can't tell, so help me out.

    Thanks.
    • Actually, I was chatting with a guy the other day who was making something really revolutionary for the Second Life system. Yep, you guessed it: In-game Pong!
    • So, can someone in the know tell me if there really are gaming elements within this thing?

      The games are all "in-game", and user-created. There are FPS areas, RPG areas, air-to-air combat, and so on, all implemented through the built-in scripting system. That said, most of the world consists of shopping malls, casinos, clubs, and people's houses. I happen to enjoy getting on every few months to just walk around and take screenshots of the incredible crap that most people like to build when given total cre

    • Re:Second life? (Score:3, Informative)

      by cowscows ( 103644 )
      I generally think of SL as basically two things. First off, it's a graphical chat room. The majority of my time there is spent talking with other people. As far as that goes, it's as good as the people you hang around with in game. There's a lot of weirdos and dumbasses in SL, so it can be difficult at times.

      The second thing is as a sandbox. The closest other thing I can think of would be Gerry's Mod for HalfLife, although there are some significant differences. Most of my time online there that isn't spent

  • Too commercialized (Score:2, Interesting)

    by FooAtWFU ( 699187 )
    Second Life is too commercialized. People say that Linden Labs encourages users to make money from selling their own creations, and that's not inherently a bad thing, but it means there's a lot of in-game advertising all over the place, and LLabs doesn't really help because the in-game "classifieds" are essentially pay-for-top-rank deals. Another symptom of this: All of Top N Most-Popular spots in the game get their popularity by paying people to sit around there in specially constructed chairs doing nothin

    • Second Life is too commercialized. People say that Linden Labs encourages users to make money from selling their own creations, and that's not inherently a bad thing, but it means there's a lot of in-game advertising all over the place, and LLabs doesn't really help because the in-game "classifieds" are essentially pay-for-top-rank deals. Another symptom of this: All of Top N Most-Popular spots in the game get their popularity by paying people to sit around there in specially constructed chairs doing nothin

      • Not quite. There's no such thing as protected speech in Second Life, if you say something that pisses off a large majority of the population, the administrators will start looking for excuses to shitcan you. Friend of mine made a "fetus cannon" as a joka, and was perminently banned from SL for it.
  • ... with credit card. Oh, no, it's just for "validation". Truth? It's so they can charge someone in an INSTANT for anything that costs money. They're not stupid, they're ready to pounce on any "free" user that even for a moment considers doing something that costs.

    I'm sure they gotta make money somehow. Too bad they feel like they need to trap people into spending it rather than doing it honestly.
    • Well use the cellphone feature. Then again...... They might just start harrasing you.
    • It could be used for that, but I think the truth is less devious.

      Every new account gets some "Start-up" benefits (L$, cheap land, etc.). Somebody with a lot of time on their hands could create a lot of accounts and dump all these benefits into a single account (or just sell them outright).

      Also, there is a LOT of nudity and sex in SL! They need to keep minors out and using a CC# is a (not foolproof) way to do this.

  • no sound; no file uploading; no texture downloading.

    I just tried running the windows SL client under wine (on a gentoo box with a fairly recent NVidia card) last week. I'm able to hear sounds as well as view textures (didn't try uploading any files), and the 3d hardware acceleration is definitely working.

    Best bet: stick with wine for now, until they get the linux client functionality fully worked out.

    And yeah, I'm still trying to figure out something interesting to do/build in SL. The casinos and sex

  • In the 1980s, people who considered themselves 'futurists', 'avant-gardists', and the 'chlidren of the dawn of the new (information) age', chatted around on BBSs. If you're not old enough to need to consult the Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] for this, you won't understand how weird it is to see history repeating itself again and again, every time a new paradigm shift threatens the online world.

    In the late 1980s, a new "paradigm" was around: the Internet, quickly maturing and spreading around, touting itself as an alternative to bulletin boards by introducing Usenet News, and replacing chatrooms with IRC. At that time, old-time BBS veterans scorned the bright, goggle-eyed 'utopians' and 'dreamers' that looked to the Internet as the future of communication, socialization, creative expression, and even (God forbids!) business. They were scorned and laughed upon; BBSes already provided all those things and were much better at doing so than the clumsy 'Internetters' could with their old-fashioned and cumbersome tools. And the media covering the BBS labeled the nerds connecting to them as interested only in sex and games.

    As a matter of fact, a whole generation of die-hard BBSers, highly skilled veterans in promoting their services using a well-proven technology, simply were reluctant to relinquish their status quo and embrace the Brave New World of the Internet.

    In the 1990s, with BBSes "absorbed" by the Internet (by tying them together using the Internet as a medium, and propagating discussions, chatrooms, and early MUDs/MUSHes/MOOs to the Internet), people fought among themselves what was the best form of propagating information and providing remote access to it. Telnet-based servers competed with gopher servers which in turn competed with proprietary protocols for chatrooms and MUD/MUSHes/MOOs. There was no clear 'winner' (gopher seemed to be the best bet at the time) until an obscure scientist at CERN developed yet another model of remote access to information: the Web was born, and it was text-based. Still, gopherers and promoters of other tools scorned the 'arrivists' -- they simply wouldn't leave "their" proprietary tools in order to clumsily embrace "hypertext", which was so limited in scope and hardly used by anyone except a few freaks and outcasts on a very limited basis.

    When the first graphical browser came out, the veterans of the text-based Internet frowned upon Mosaic and their ilk. People simply didn't have the required bandwidth to show 'nice graphics'; a text-based model had been in place for ages (at this time, MIME-encoded attachments for email was still a 'novelty'), it worked well and fast, and used little bandwidth. Why would people need a 'graphical browser'? The answer, of course, was clear if we read the media's coverage of the Web in the mid-1990s: it's all about sex and games.

    Starting around 1995/6, something seemed to click in place, and suddenly the Internet was not only 'sex and games'. Through the Web, people could also communicate, socialize, exchange information, get access to databases -- and do business. The media was intrigued; corporations started to publish information online through the World-Wide Web; Linux and the major open source tools started to get disseminated through the Web as well. The Web, indeed, absorbed previous technologies and replaced it with new and better paradigms: chatrooms, blogs, forums replaced earlier technologies, but they're basically driven by the same needs: distributing information, content, chatting, socializing, doing business. And, of course, also sex and games. But in the 'enlighted' year of 2006, while we live with 'sex and games', almost all of us would agree that the Internet (or, better said, the World-Wide Web) is not about sex and games; they're part of it, but there is so much more than that.

    People now fight to define what the "Web 2.0" is going to be, but the "new Web" is nothing new, just applying new tools to a decade-old technology; yes, w

    • SL is an interesting thing. I would like to see it as what the next shift in tech will go towards. I imagine in a short enough time period running a simple 3d app will be easy, all our current pcs will be legacy old buckets, very easily capable of handling something like sl.

      The problem with sl is it is still linden labs trying to stay a float. They aren't creating an interesting technology as much as they are creating a closed system to keep themselves in buisness.

      The first step really should be a 3d webser
      • Reapy, yours is a very interesting comment -- but honestly, can a company release a piece of a software application, mantain a grid with 2000+ servers, give technical support as well as community support, do the promotion of the environment, and do nothing else besides that (meaning: no added value services on top of the infrastructure and software), and still give it away for free?

        I think you have it the other way round when comparing Second Life with VRML. VRML is a protocol, released publicly; what a g

        • Yes, linden labs central storage is vital for those points you brought up, IP and currency.

          I guess the only comment I have to that, is try to take everything you have listed and apply it to the current web we are using now.

          What currency do we use? Real world money.
          What do we do about IP? Lawyers.

          I guess my point I was trying to make was that I completly understand what SL provides and why they charge for their services, but because of those things, it is the reason SL will not be one of the things to bring
          • I fail to understand, under that model, how do you expect Linden Lab's employees to get paid... :)

            Remember, we had the Mosaic browser because it was sponsored by the NCSA; actually, we had the Internet because it was sponsored by the NCSA (and similar foundations in other countries...). So "taxpayers paid for it". The Web's genesis was a pretty unusual one: from academia to students/researchers first. People with lot of free time, lots of information to pass among themselves, lots of free access to resour

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