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

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: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.

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