Second Life Native Linux client Released

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."

Comments

Lower TCO

[funpet]

This eliminates some of the TCO of this line of work.

Sweet.

[Max Threshold]

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?

Re:Sweet.

[CableModemSniper]

Theoretically speaking, the answer to that question is yes.

Re:Sweet.

[khellendros1984]

Although it's more useful to get a weapon that traps someone in a box and puts them way up in the air...

Booooring!

[garrett714]

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!

[jandrese]

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.

Re:Booooring!

[MikeFM]

It seems to have a lot more in common with the social MUDs of lore than with Everquest or WoW.

Re:Booooring!

[geminidomino]

You craft your own avatars? Cool.

So, is the Half-black, half-japanese Pizza delivery boy with samurai swords already taken?

Re:There is a real life out there too, you know?

[B1ackD0g]

That's great news! Where can I pick up a +5 sword of flame and kick some monster butt? Does Wal-Mart carry those now? lol

A reply for most comments thus far:

[cryptomancer]

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.

Re:A reply for most comments thus far:

[psocccer]

My understanding of it is it's just a graphical MUSH. 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.

Re:A reply for most comments thus far:

[at_18]

It's not a game. The goal is to live there, no to play. It says so from its very name ("Second Life").

Re:There is a real life out there too, you know?

[Gnight]

They're between the condoms and the deodorant, duh.

Oh, sorry, I guess you've never been in that section.

(kidding!)

Re:There is a real life out there too, you know?

[AuMatar]

Wow, I can slay dark gods and bring people back from the dead in real life? And make a ton of money doing it?

*goes to hand in his resignation

Re:There is a real life out there too, you know?

[Evangelion]

There aren't monsters to kill in Second Life.

It's not even really a game.

Re:There is a real life out there too, you know?

[menkhaura]

Hard to see a sig so on topic as yours...

Re:There is a real life out there too, you know?

[networkBoy]

Just script some up and let them loos in other peoples houses :-)

Actually...
would that work? that would be just about enough to get me to join. A programmer's MMORPG, the better code wins!
-nB

Real Life

[Surye]

I'm glad they didn't bother porting Real Life to linux, I heard the sequel is so much more interesting.

Re:Real Life

[Carnildo]

Real Life is completely compatible with Linux alread.

Just in case

[satanami69]

The coords to complete the Resignation quest are 24,76.

Second life?

[eyepeepackets]

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.

Re:Second life?

[FooAtWFU]

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!

Re:Second life?

[dr.badass]

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 creative freedom.

So, it's not really a "game", but it can be fun.

Re:Second life?

[cowscows]

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 chatting is spent building whatever random thing comes to mind. While they're far from perfect, the creation tools are very flexible, and I'm often pleasantly surprised by what some of the players manage to come up with.

And now that I think about it, there's a third thing that SL is good for, getting weirded the hell out. Some of the people online are just really damn strange, and despite over 10 years of seeing all sorts of strange crap on the internet, SL impresses me with the depravity and general bizarreness of some of the builds and characters.

Some people have attempted to create games within the SL world, but the game has some pretty endemic lag and frame rate issues, which greatly limits the effectiveness of many game types. But if you want to play chess on a giant board like in the harry potter movie or something, that sort of thing would certainly be possible to create.

Re:Second life?

[eyepeepackets]

Thanks for the thoughtful answer cowscows, I'll have to have a closer look.

Happy weekend to yous.

Re:There is a real life out there too, you know?

[John Nowak]

It depends on the permissions set for the property you're on, although these can be hacked around in some ways. So yeah, it is a programmer's MMOG, and yes, you can do stuff like that if you're a clever enough programmer. Awhile back, one person made an object that, when activated, would duplicate itself... and then the duplicates would duplicate themselves... and so on. It was essentially a doomsday device that was used the bring down multiple servers. This will get your banned fast, and the servers probably have some countermeasures in place now to make sure such things won't happen again, but that's just one example of the kind of "power" that SL offers you. That said, all I seem to manage to do is make a hot asian girl and get hit on.

Too commercialized

[FooAtWFU]

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 nothing to boost their popularity. They then put special advertising all over the place to make their money. There are just way, way too many ads, they're everywhere, and they're pretty gaudy.

This is before we get into the nature of the in-game economy aside from advertising. This guy has already described it more cynically than I ever could.

Re:Too commercialized

[technoextreme]

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 nothing to boost their popularity. They then put special advertising all over the place to make their money. There are just way, way too many ads, they're everywhere, and they're pretty gaudy

So what you are saying is that Second Life is just like Real life??

Re:Too commercialized

[AlexMax2742]

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.

The "free" membership

[DoktorSeven]

... 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.

Re:The "free" membership

[PhoenixOne]

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.

Works better under WINE

[fR0993R-on-Atari-520]

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 clubs are not exactly worth my time.

Cheers,
Tim

Use a cellphone feature and not credit card.

[technoextreme]

Well use the cellphone feature. Then again...... They might just start harrasing you.

Ah, the joys of paradigm shifting...

[Gwyneth_Llewelyn]

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 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

Re:Ah, the joys of paradigm shifting...

[Reapy]

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 webserver. This would be something that I could run on my home machine, jump in, create a 3d world with some files, and leave it running for people to connect. They connect with their 3d browser via my url, log in with the avatar they have created, and can wonder around and do the types of things that I have defined in the 3d world. That would be the first step in a huge shift on the net.

SL is not. It requireds a credit card to have access. It requres the use of their asset server. It requires currency to upload anything to the server. To put something down perminatly, you have to rent server space by buying land from them. If they lose power or something similar, the whole thing goes down. It is all this sandbox stuff that people want, but stuck on a closed system.

Is this idea similar to VRML, I sort of remember that but I honestly have no clue, I was too ignorent at the time to really understand what most of that was.

But what I described above would be the big first step towards a new direction. I can def see regular old webpages running along side 3d worlds on a server. The idea of that, to me, is really, really amazing.

Re:Ah, the joys of paradigm shifting...

[Gwyneth_Llewelyn]

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 group of people said was: "here is this amazing protocol that allows you to embed 3D images inside Web pages. Go build your things with it". And some did. Some sold kits for producing VRML code. Some created plug-ins (and sold these) for web browsers. Some produced content in VRML, and put it on Web pages -- sometimes for free (like demos), sometimes on a per-request basis, which usually was paid for. The problem with VRML (like HTML) is that it's just a protocol, nothing else -- either people use it or not, and, when using it, they might promote services on top of it.

On the other hand, Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, are an application and hosting provider. Their only source of income is running an extensive grid of servers to host your 3D content, and provide a 3D browser/viewer for you to access that content. Their core business is not providing content (or else, they could capitalize on that); they just have a handful of designers, and perhaps around 0.1% of all content in Second Life was actually created by Linden Lab (and you have free access to that).

As you can see, this is not "just a nice thingy" that someone thought it would be cool to have and to post somewhere on Sourceforge (there are enough semi-abandoned virtual reality projects there already). This is a new area of business: 3D content hosting, and that's what LL does. But they do not provide the content by themselves, just the infrastructure needed for that content to have a persistent storage.

So, their business model works like this: you wish to have persistent 3D content storage (read: you wish that your created objects are on display for everyone else to see, permanently, even when you're offline), well, you pay a tiny fee monthly for Linden Lab to host it on their servers. If, instead, you just wish to look/use/enjoy other user's content (and rest assured, that's exactly what around 80% of all users of Second Life wish to do), you can do that for absolutely free.

I hope this explains why Linden Lab charges for hosting 3D web content -- servers, bandwidth, maintenance and backups, technical support (24h/7, in different languages, on timezones around the globe), and community support take time, require professional expertise, and there must be "someone" to cover all those costs. Linden Lab is still a tiny company, and 3D content hosting is their only source of income.

You could argue that Linden Lab could enter the content development business and make their money from there. Sure, they could -- but can their handful of content creators compete with a team of 140,000 very creative and talented people? There is not really going to happen :)

What you argue for is something different: a loosely-knit structure of people having their own servers at home for others to connect to, so, in a sense, each user would, at their own expense, provide 3D content hosting for free.

Now, at the current state of the art, this has a few limitations. While the technology used in Second Life is arguably not the best implementation, it currently supports a bit over 10 TBytes of content for 140,000 users. This means that each of the servers, on average, just to support 40-100 avatars, need 10-20 Mbps of upstreaming bandwidth on average. While 16 Mbps ADSL links are already available, they're not bi-directional; you can consider lucky if you have over 512 Kbps upstream bandwidth -- barely enough for 4-5 people. 10-20 Mbps of upstream bandwid

Re:Ah, the joys of paradigm shifting...

[Reapy]

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 about a 3d revolution on the web.

The reason is that if I want to go 3d, I can ONLY pay linden labs for hosting. I can't even host my own simulator even if I was sitting on a really sweet oc3 connection.

That is the limitation that will always make secondlife just secondlife. Should there every become a free 3d browser, like mosiac or netscape or ie, AND a free 3d server, like apache, then that would become the start of a new shift towards 3d (should the tech work of coarse).

There is no need for intelectual property protection that LL provides. If I created a texture and posted it on my website to buy, and someone buys it, then puts it in sl years before I have even heard of it, there is no way for LL to provide any proof of ownership with their closed system, and the proof would have to come from "the real world" so to speak. I do not see why this could not extend to 3d objects like it works now with text and pictures.

There is no need for money. The linden dollar is only valued because it works within the closed system. This is an interesting thing because due to the closed system, it requires using lindens to obtain anything in the games, which creates the value behind making objects and selling them. I am not sure if this market would exist in an open system, but maybe it would, except people would sell things for US the same way any online store does today.

Bandwith is a big issue. 10 years ago I used geocities to host my webpages, they had the bandwith to do it. Now I just host it off my cable connection, something I would never have dreamed of back then. My personal page is just that, for myself and a few friends, so my cable easily can handle the bandwith. Perhaps in another 10 years, I could host it on my new connection that offers me gigabit speeds into the internet, who is to say where the bandwith will go, and perhaps we wont even see any 3d things until the bandwith is there to support it.

So again, I didn't mean to knock linden labs in what they do and their fees. I think SL is a fantastic product and enjoy it immensly. But LL will always be akin to a MMORPG system as long as they are the sole owners of the network. It has to go free and distributed if it wants to be the next thing on the web.

Re:Ah, the joys of paradigm shifting...

[Gwyneth_Llewelyn]

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 resources they didn't pay for. Also, when finally the companies started to use the Web actively (ie promoting services and offering services for sale online), things like micro-payments never worked well, globally -- just on isolated cases. With some exceptions, the concept that you pay for content, or for ads, did not last beyond the Internet Bubble Bursting. The biggest exception being, of course, Google Adsense... and local ads on the major portal sites.

Do you suggest that the same visionary thinking of having governments and investing taxpayers' money should also apply to Linden Lab/the Metaverse/virtual realities? Perhaps people should then start to put some pressure on their respective governments and demand them to push forward the effort towards virtual realities now? I guess that's a very interesting idea. My personal experience so far with the government of my country is that they're a bit "burned" with virtual realities, after spending some hunderds of thousands of Euros on isolated (ie. not interconnected) projects which were abandoned few months after completion. They're now looking towards things that are cheap, require no investment, are easy to deploy, and can be re-used even after the projects are finished. Thus, Second Life fits in nicely. The major issues with the platform are technological ones, overcoming major issues like the lack of in-world HTML, an un-integrated IM system, etc. All these are being addressed -- although very, very, very slowly. The lack of better integration with existing application servers (ie. through web services that work or APIs for plug-ins, either client-side or server-side (?) has also been mentioned as not being addressed "fast enough".

Speaking for myself, I'd be willing to try to put that "pressure" on them :) So far, the lack of acceptance by the current local state universities has been not too encouraging; they prefer to "invest" in having students using proven technology that is low (or no) cost these days, instead of developing their own from scratch. They seem to be wiser now.

Mind you, Second Life will be open source one day, that is not the issue; Linden Lab's CEO has repeatedly said so. The difficulty, at the moment, is to make all those critical issues working. And do it fast enough before someone else does it, is able to go open source, and focus on developing added value services to sponsor the costs. So far, I've seen just a few groups on the "race": the ultimate vapourware OpenCroquet and the yet-to-be-deployed Multiverse. On the "paid", licensed, side of things there is stil lActiveWorlds and tiny things like Virtual Universes -- all available for a fee. Beyond that... you've got literally dozens of half-finished products on Sourceforge and the like. All incompatible, all different, all with people working on them sporadically and without talking to each other. But many with some good ideas here and there. Still, they see themselves more like "software for developing your own MMOG", not really a platform for things like deployment of creative content, virtual economy, and socializing/networking.

I certainly agree that bandwidth is an issue today, but it won't be in 10 years (unless you wish photorealism by then :) ). But well, one shouldn't minimize the need for implementing things like protecting intellectual property. "Get a lawyer" is not easy to do when you're a