Second Life Friends List Meme

Best laid plans, roads covered with best intentions. That seems to be my life as of late. Yes, I suppose I am feeling a little bit sorry for myself in many ways. It annoys me to know end that my energy levels are so very low and that I seem to be both missing and lacking the motivation to write and the drive to delve deeper into BDSM topics.

In essence the last few months, or rather ever since I moved house and still trying to fix things and get things squared away and sorted (why on earth do I have so much stuff!!). Just remember if you wonder why on earth I am still writing about this, think just for a moment if you will how much it irks me having to see all this in real life. 🙂 So perhaps a little bit of sympathy? Please?

On the plus side, I am making, tiny bits of progress. I am hoping to have most of the boxes squared away in some fashion by the time Christmas rolls around. I shall have people over to stay about prior to Christmas and after. Hopefully even some over New Year, which means I should at least be able to offer them a bed.

For those of my readers in the states, I do hope that you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and then you enjoyed your time, hopefully with family and/or loved ones. It’s something that does not happen here at this side of the `pond’, although we do have the odd habbit creeping in such as “Black Friday“. I am not entirely sure if I approve of that, perhaps I shall dedicate my thoughts on that another time. Now is perhaps not the time.

It is however time for the main part of my blog! As I said, not having much inspiration and drive, forces me to look for the more light hearted content that allows me to fulfil my obligation to write. Yes, sometimes it does feel like an obligation, but on the other hand, now I am pounding away on my keyboard, listening to classical music (I always write better to classical music then say songs), I feel a certain satisfaction I am guessing. The fact that I find things to talk about, and if nothing else to write about; which gives you all a little window into my existence, drives me onwards. It’s strange how often the first five hundred words are always the hardest: Once that is done the rest often flows..

But onwards, let’s talk about Second Life Friends!

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Story: Self Control – Chapter II

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote the first chapter in a story, called Self Control¹. I have struggled a while to find the direction I want to go with this, but I think I am slowly getting there. The second chapter is now ready. It is a bit more descriptive then the first and lighter on the interaction but bear with me.

As per usual; my stories are published under the:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

I hope you like it, please any comments, constructive and otherwise are very welcome.

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A look at the new Second Life viewer

Well, there is a lot of noise going on about the new Second Life viewer.If must admit I felt already a dread of fear after watching the Linden Lab video talking about the new features. It’s an interesting mix of hype- and buzzword bingo mixed with a healthy dose of pat-on-the-back, lick-me-ups and see-how-good-I-find-our-own-product.

Being the curious person myself, I decided to take a look. Surprisingly they already have a Linux viewer ready for download, sadly it seems Lindens haven’t caught on to the 64bit movement yet.

So after loading and starting the new client, let us have a look to what is going on:

1 – Menus – Directly noticeable is that the menus have changed completely. So while this make sense for newer users, for older users like me, this means a complete new learning curve.

2 – Screen estate – The new bars at the top, take up way too much screen estate, I like a nice clean UI.

3 – Colour choice – Strange enough not a colour choice inside. Even the themes offering a dual choice of skins in the old viewer has been gone. While something like the Emerald Viewer offers a myriad of choices, Linden Labs in their infinite wisdom have decided to just go with very dark colours that give me a headache.

4 – Icons – I find the icons quite a lot more confusing than the old “box” icons that immediately show me what is a prim and what not. And Why is the trash the same icon as any other folder? You wonder if any of them actually read a book on interface design at all.

5 – Sidebar – Looks okay, perhaps need to get used to this but it takes up again extra screen space. A major bug with the viewer comes immediately comes into view. Clicking the sidebar .. makes your HUD objects shift. Seriously .. what the heck? Since when is that acceptable?

Okay, is there anything good about the new viewer? In my opinion not as much. sure it looked rather licked. But form should never triumph over function. Once again it seems that Linden Lab pushes things through because it suits them rather than, what is wanted. Looking at the plethora of Open Source viewers that are out there, think Emerald, and look at the amount of extra features that are already implemented there.

One thing I did notice, and this is probably a pure Linux issue, sound works properly this time. Before, with the 1.x series of the Second Life viewer, the viewer directly speaks to the sound hardware device. I mean come on, how do you even come up with stuff like this. At least the new viewer hands off the sound to the operating systems sound system to deal with it properly.

So, all in all, once again the Lindens have pushed something which nobody really is waiting for, without listening or thinking of what their established users would want. So far I am utterly unimpressed by the viewer and it reaks largely of fail.

your friendly penguin-loving reporter from the field
signing off….

xx
lexi

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Weirdness: Latest SL Linux Viewer (1.21.6.99587)

I don’t think it’s a huge surprise to most people who know me, that I am a fervent Linux user and a fervent RLV user as well.

Since Marine release the 1.14.* series of the viewer  (which is based on the 1.21.6 Second Life Viewer) a big  thanks to Loom Kish and Jessica Hultcrantz for taking care of the Linux RLV viewer, I was quickly able to switch to the latest viewer. Or so I thought …

Anyway it seems in their wisdom, LL have decided that they know exactly how the permissions of the files should be. Sadly this means that it has been made “impossible” to run the client in a multi user setup. After digging some around in the second life wiki I came across the following article, which states:

“On systems where multiple people use Second Life, you may wish to unpack Second Life, then have your root user move it to /opt and link /opt/path-to-Secondlife/secondlife to /usr/games. Any user who has access to play games should be able to run Second Life directly from the command line with secondlife.”

Anyway, I am slightly OCPD about how I install my clients. So let me quickly explain:

Basically I install the viewers in the /usr/local/games/ directory, then I use symlinks to hook everything together. The reason I do this is cause I have a ‘starter script in /usr/local/bin/ which quickly calls the script that is needed. This gives me the ability to switch quickly between clients and have backup clients installed as needed, by just changing the symlink.

But I digress…

After installing the normal viewer this morning I tried to start it and nothing happened. I tried again, and indeed again, nothing. So after running the ./secondlife binary by hand I got a “permission denied”. When I looked at the permission of the files, to my shock I found out how well `mangled` they were.

I have talked about this in the SL Linux User groups inworld. But the best suggestion was “oh just install it in your home directory“, which frankly is the most absurd suggestion I have heard. Yes it will work, but it is not the way things are intended to run. Sorry, it just is not.

After poking around a little bit, I have decided to write a script that uses a couple of find statements to reset the permissions to files, to a more sane and normal setting. You can find a copy the script on a pastebin here, also since Worpdress.com doesn’t allow scripts or textfiles to be uploaded, I’ll post the PDF with the source code here.

Anyway with the permissions reset like they should be on a normal application: everything seems to be working just fine 🙂

PS. Feel free to also IM me in world for a copy of the script if you want it.

xx
lexi

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RestrainedLife 1.12 for Linux

Well, it’s finally there. After a leave of absence, Loom Kish, finally released the much waited and anticipated RestrainedLife Viewer for Linux. This is version 1.12 which is based on the Second Life 1. 1.20.15 (release 92456).

This brings also to an end, my ongoing frustrations for trying to compile the own viewer come hereby (or perhaps for now) finally to an end. For some reason, The viewer either does not compile cleanly on my Linux box (either normal, or chrooted). Even following the various instructions and with help of Make-SL [1] script by Henri Beauchamp didn’t seem to help me very much. (yes I still have a build log available if anyone is desperately interested).

The only bug I have found so far is that when compiling from source, the “res-dl” directory is not created. Now the official Linux client from Linden Labs has this directory. When I compiled the Second Life viewer from scratch this directory was missing.

Now as far as I can tell; This directory contains a series of bitmaps used for context sensitive feedback of the cursor. (much buzzwords!). Without this folder being present, Second Life still works just perfectly fine. However, you wont get a changing cursor (into a hand, a finger, a magnifying glass.

The FIX: copy this folder from a normal client, and restart your Restrained Life client and all is/should be well 🙂

as per usual, the URI for the Restrained Life for Linux client. Go download it! 🙂

xx
lexi

ps. now as to my current situation … see my next post 😉

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Restrained Life 1.11.5 for Linux Released

Just a small note really, (and so people can find it through google):

Loom Kish has released the latest version of Marine’s Restrained Life viewer for Linux (verison 1.11.5):

It’s currently hosted on Rapidshare and can be accessed there:

Have fun and enjoy.

xx

Note: the latest version is now 1.12 based on the 1.20.15 viewer
lexi

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In lieu of the latest second life viewer

Right, I am just throwing this up here before I sadly have to disappear for a while (only for the long weekend).

What’s going on??

Having seen many questions about the latest update for the Second Life viewer 1.9.0(5), have seen many bug reports about people complaining that the Restrained Life feature has vanished. Let me explain this:

As the viewer is open source (that means that you can copy the source [1] and build your own viewer (kinda like mac donalds really … “have it your way“) and publish it (providing you provide the code again). And this is exactly what Marine has so wonderfully done.

So why doesn’t it work? Simple. The Restrained Life functionality is a two-parter. There are scripts in the cuffs that do certain things (like not being able to TP, and unable to detach while locked. These script (or rather the functionality in these scripts) in turn are enforced by the Restrained Life viewer.

Now the Restrained Life viewer has always been intended for bondage-(nuts, hardcore-fans, etc), people who want a almost more realistic experience (certainly from a ‘poor’ subbies point of view). However the scripts are designed perfectly well so you can use the cuffs with the normal viewer (okay, you loose some functionality that makes the cuffs so deliciously wicked and erotic).

The only way I can really think of making it any clearer is to use a car analogy:

You have a car (second life viewer), to driver around inworld (doesn’t need explaining does it), now lets say this car runs on ‘unleaded fuel’ (Real Restrained Viewer), suddenly you decide to fill your car with this ‘leaded fuel’ (Linden Lab Offical Second Life Viewer). Sure the car may drive but it doesn’t work as your old fuel and it kinda gives that “I miss something feeling”

So where does that leave us?

Basically, exercise patience. A new viewer would need to be recompiled from scratch and made sure that all functionality works [2]. This process might take a couple of days. All I would suggest is keep an eye on the various sources (I am thinking the Real Restrained Update and Support group, Marine’s Blog, etc) and update when the latest version of the Restrained Life viewer is released. Please note that versions for the Mac and/or Linux may be slightly behind, again, patience is all I can advise.

But, now it doesn’t work and I wan it back!?

The only thing I can suggest for this is to download and reinstall the old viewer. Sadly I don’t use Windows or a Mac (I am open for sponsor deals *grins*). For Linux users I would advise using a lot of symlinks to keep separate versions apart. IM me in-world if you really want to know.

Good luck and I’ll try to let people know when the new viewer is released and all (unless Marines releases it over the weekend. Anyway, I hope that this clarifies a bit what is going on [2].

footnotes:

[1] – yes I know there is a lot more to it, but this blog is not the place to go into F/OSS software and GPL issues.
[2] – No I don’t know. I am not associated with Marine [3], nor do I do development work or testing.
[3] – Although if I had the money, I would buy any/all the stuff she releases *grins* and yes, it’s just that good.

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