Its been ages since I played with SecondLife but I was reminded about it this evening and thought I would put something together regarding how to install it. There are not any packages for it in the Ubuntu repositories, but it is pretty simple to get running.
For those that currently use SecondLife maybe you can comment on places to hang out and things to go see for anyone just joining in.
Requirements for SecondLife 1.19.1.4
The first requirement is that your machine passes the minimum system requirements. On Linux this generally means 3D rendering ability. Here are the official requirements, for your information:
- Internet Connection: Cable or DSL
- 800MHz Pentium III or Athlon or better (recommended: 1.5GHz or more)
- 512MB (recommended: 768MB or more)
- nVidia GeForce 2, GeForce 4mx, or better (recommend one of the following: 6700, 6800, 7600, 7800, 7900, 8400, 8500, 8600, 8800, Go 7400, Go 7600, Go 7800, Go 7900)
- ATI Radeon 8500, 9250, or better
I should note that SecondLife seems to run just fine on my onboard intel 915 video card. As long as you can run Compiz effects you should probably be OK.
The following commands will walk you through installing SecondLife system-wide. This will make it available for any user on the machine, and may be different than other methods you may have seen.
Installing SecondLife 1.19.1.4
First off we’ll need to manually download the archive, which we’ll unpack into /opt.
wget -c http://download-secondlife-com.s3.amazonaws.com/SecondLife_i686_1_19_1_4.tar.bz2
sudo tar -C /opt/ -xf ~/Desktop/SecondLife_i686_1_19_1_4.tar.bz2
sudo ln -s /opt/SecondLife_i686_1_19_1_4/secondlife /usr/local/bin/
You’ll now be able to launch SecondLife with:
secondlife