The “Open Letter” is strongly biased against “unverified accounts”. I think this is not acceptable. Paying and not-paying residents have the same dignity and must have the same rights.

This won’t obviously make the headlines, but in these same hours many other residents are explaining why they believe “Project Open Letter” is wrong or where they think it fails.

Here are some examples. I’m going to expand this list as I will find new references.

• THE GRID IS FALLING! (not) – this article by Kami Harbinger makes many good points against the “Open Letter”
• I think Baba Yamamoto is insightful when he says that the issues described in the “Open Letter” will be taken care of as the normal course of development and then the signers can claim they “forced linden lab” to take note of the community
• Nobody Fugazi describes his experience – basically, many SL problems could be avoided by the user, and it looks like this is working for him
• The Metaversed Podcast / Sunday 29th April, where Nick Wilson dismisses “Project Open Letter” (disclaimer: I didn’t listen to it – spoken english is hard to me)
• I’m totally with trinity_dejavu when s/he says that EVERY new user to SL makes SL a better and richer place for all of us. Don’t assume for one second that the “Project Open Letter” position on unverified accounts in any way represents the majority position
• excerpts from AWM Mars comments [ 1 - 2 ] in the Linden Lab blog:
  [the Open Letter] unfortunately includes statements/proviso’s that certain types of account would not be welcome to use the community and be excluded, and their abilities be subject to restrictions, when times get tough, I will not be a party to that discrimination in any shape or form; the correct approach for any community, should be to suggest scaling up the ability for ALL to be able to login. That is acheiveable!
• tx Oh underlines how many people using free accounts actually add value to the Second Life community reporting bugs, helping people in-world and creating freebies
• not related to the “Project Open Letter”, but even Amazon is prepared to accept a certain amount of instability as price for being at the leading edge of the 3D frontier
• The Success of Project Open Letter – And, Perhaps, The Failure by Nobody Fugazi
• Laetizia Coronet didn’t sign the letter, but she found her name on it. She also points out that whenever performance issues are discussed, ‘unverifieds’ are discussed as well, and usually the idea is that limiting their capabilities is the cure for all ills

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Troll comments are welcome. Be funny please!

looks like beta-1.13.4.3 lacks client-manifest-i686 …

i copied the one from FL-1.13.3.58185.

now compiling …

I’m currently using the stable Second Life Viewer on Windows (that is, 1.13.3 (2) Jan 30 2007 15:34:24 release).
My avatar doesn’t usually wear shirts, but after I logged in I found myself wearing a nice t-shirt:

Watching it better, I discover that this t-shirt is actually using screen_last.bmp, the snapshot that the viewer automatically takes when you logout:

Here is screen_last (jpeg version):

Working around a llmozlib-related error, I commented out lines 126-147 and 194-195 in indra/SConstruct .

I also changed indra/llcommon/llpreprocessor.h as suggested in the sldev mailing list: at line 54, change
#define LL_LIBXUL_ENABLED 1
to
#define LL_LIBXUL_ENABLED 0

Then I followed the same steps I wrote in the previous post.

Feedback from other Ubuntu / other linux distro users is welcome!

(is this message a default thing?)

Reference:

• Source code
• Compiling the viewer (Linux)
• My system specs

tar xzf slviewer-src-FL-1.13.3.58185.tar.gz
tar xzf slviewer-linux-libs-FL-1.13.3.58185.tar.gz
unzip slviewer-artwork-FL-1.13.3.58185.zip
tar xzf fmodapi375linux.tar.gz

as kindly suggested in a comment to previous article, i’m going to edit the first line of any build scripts from ‘#!/bin/sh’ to ‘#!/bin/bash’:

vim linden/indra/newview/linux_tools/launch_url.sh
vim linden/indra/newview/linux_tools/wrapper.sh
(UPDATE: this one doesn’t exist in beta-1.13.4.3) vim linden/indra/newview/linux_tools/package-client.sh
vim linden/libraries/include/boost/pool/detail/pool_construct_simple.sh
vim linden/libraries/include/boost/pool/detail/pool_construct.sh
vim linden/libraries/i686-linux/include/apr-1/arch/unix/apr_arch_threadproc.h

i hope i edited all appropriate files.

cd fmodapi375linux/
cp api/inc/* ../linden/libraries/i686-linux/include/
cp api/libfmod-3.75.so ../linden/libraries/i686-linux/lib_release_client/

export SLSRC=/my/path/to/linden/

cp -a /usr/include/atk-1.0 ${SLSRC}/libraries/i686-linux/include/
cp -a /usr/include/gtk-2.0 ${SLSRC}/libraries/i686-linux/include/
cp -a /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/include/* ${SLSRC}/libraries/i686-linux/include/gtk-2.0/
cp -a /usr/include/glib-2.0 ${SLSRC}/libraries/i686-linux/include/
cp -a /usr/lib/glib-2.0/include/* ${SLSRC}/libraries/i686-linux/include/glib-2.0/
cp -a /usr/include/pango-1.0 ${SLSRC}/libraries/i686-linux/include/
cp -a /usr/include/cairo/* ${SLSRC}/libraries/i686-linux/include/

cd ../linden/indra/

vim newview/linux_tools/client-manifest-i686
(i uncomment the two lines corresponding to libllkdu and libkdu – then they should be automatically copied into the right place in the runtime directory as i’m following the ‘Packaging the client’ instructions)

scons DISTCC=no BTARGET=client BUILD=releasefordownload
(i’m using the BUILD=releasefordownload scon option because i need to build a complete tarball for the end-user)

(…now waiting…)

Here is my system specs and here’s what I did:

tar xzf slviewer-src-FL-1.13.3.58018.tar.gz
unzip slviewer-artwork-FL-1.13.3.58018.zip
tar xzf slviewer-linux-libs-FL-1.13.3.58018.tar.gz
tar xzf fmodapi375linux.tar.gz

cd fmodapi375linux/
cp api/inc/* ../linden/libraries/i686-linux/include/
cp api/libfmod-3.75.so ../linden/libraries/i686-linux/lib_release_client/

export SLSRC=~/Desktop/sl/Opensource/1.13.3.58018/linden
cp -a /usr/include/atk-1.0 ${SLSRC}/libraries/i686-linux/include/
cp -a /usr/include/gtk-2.0 ${SLSRC}/libraries/i686-linux/include/
cp -a /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/include/* ${SLSRC}/libraries/i686-linux/include/gtk-2.0/
cp -a /usr/include/glib-2.0 ${SLSRC}/libraries/i686-linux/include/
cp -a /usr/lib/glib-2.0/include/* ${SLSRC}/libraries/i686-linux/include/glib-2.0/
cp -a /usr/include/pango-1.0 ${SLSRC}/libraries/i686-linux/include/
cp -a /usr/include/cairo/* ${SLSRC}/libraries/i686-linux/include/

cd ../linden/indra/
vim newview/linux_tools/client-manifest-i686
(I uncomment the two lines corresponding to libllkdu and libkdu – then they should be automatically copied into the right place in the runtime directory as I’m following the ‘Packaging the client’ instructions)

scons DISTCC=no BTARGET=client BUILD=releasefordownload

First Look binary gave me great improvements on Linux (60%-100% more FPS), so I’m going now building the sources of 1.13.3.58018. Here is the Wiki page with useful info.

I’ll try to solve the partial problem I met last month using BUILD=releasefordownload scon option (that builds a complete tarball for the end-user, similarly to the ones we download from the Linden website). After the building, I extract the resulting .bz2 archive, but the viewer didn’t start – the app_settings directory lacked lots of files. Instead, i could successfully run the viewer from the source tree…and it worked fine.
I probably misunderstood the Wiki instructions here…then Tofu Linden cleared to me that BUILD=releasefordownload is supposed to work with the slviewer-linux-libs bundle as well.

However, this time I have installed via apt-get these libraries:

• libboost-dev libboost-regex-dev libapr1.0-dev libaprutil1.0-dev libjpeg62-dev libsdl1.2-dev libvorbis-dev libexpat1-dev.

then uncompressed the viewer tar.gz:

• tar xzf slviewer-src-FL-1.13.3.58018.tar.gz

defined the location of the sources (“linden” dir.):

• export SLSRC=./linden (change this according to your case)

I was going to install all the additional dependencies (the last ones in the Prerequisites section of the Wiki page) but I stopped trying to patch xmlrpc-epi.

I continue then as described in the article of the last month. This will need a couple of hours – I go to eat now!

( … )

The result:

objcopy –keep-global-symbols newview/linux_tools/exposed-symbols.txt newview/secondlife-i686-bin-globalsyms newview/secondlife-i686-bin
strip -S -o newview/secondlife-i686-bin-stripped newview/secondlife-i686-bin
objcopy –keep-global-symbols newview/linux_tools/exposed-symbols.txt linux_crash_logger/linux-crash-logger-i686-bin-globalsyms linux_crash_logger/linux-crash-logger-i686-bin
strip -S -o linux_crash_logger/linux-crash-logger-i686-bin-stripped linux_crash_logger/linux-crash-logger-i686-bin
rm -rf newview/SecondLife_i686_1_13_3_3* && newview/linux_tools/package-client.sh linux_tools/client-manifest-i686 SecondLife_i686_1_13_3_3 default
Checking manifest…
Done.
[: 49: SecondLife_i686_1_13_3_3: unexpected operator
Building newview/SecondLife_i686_1_13_3_3 directory…
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
cp: target `SecondLife_i686_1_13_3_3/app_settings/*’ is not a directory
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
cp: target `SecondLife_i686_1_13_3_3/character/*’ is not a directory
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
cp: target `SecondLife_i686_1_13_3_3/fonts/*’ is not a directory
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
cp: target `SecondLife_i686_1_13_3_3/help/*’ is not a directory
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
cp: target `SecondLife_i686_1_13_3_3/skins/*’ is not a directory
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
cp: target `SecondLife_i686_1_13_3_3/res-sdl/*’ is not a directory
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
[: 91: ==: unexpected operator
Done.
Pruning CVS directories from newview/SecondLife_i686_1_13_3_3 directory…
Done removing CVS directories.
Pruning .svn directories from newview/SecondLife_i686_1_13_3_3 directory…
Done removing .svn directories.
Stripping bundled libraries for compactness…
Done stripping bundled libraries.
[: 125: ==: unexpected operator
[: 125: ==: unexpected operator
Creating gridargs.dat for package, grid default
[: 134: SecondLife_i686_1_13_3_3.tar.bz2: unexpected operator
Creating tarball newview/SecondLife_i686_1_13_3_3.tar.bz2…
Done.
scons: done building targets.

As the last month, it works only from inside the sources tree. But it rocks!

• http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2007/01/social_animal.html
• http://dedricmauriac.wordpress.com/2007/01/23/a-new-generation-of-npcs

• Ubuntu Edgy Feisty
• GNOME (sometimes KDE or XFCE)
• 2.6.17-10-generic 2.6.20-15-generic Ubuntu kernel

graphics

• “nvidia” proprietary kernel module
• X.Org 7.1.1 7.2.0
• server glx vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
• server glx version: 1.4
• OpenGL vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
• OpenGL renderer: unknown board/AGP/SSE/3DNOW!
• OpenGL version: 2.1.0 NVIDIA 96.25 97.55
• glu version: 1.3

hardware

• NVidia GEForce 6200
• AMD Athlon XP 1600+
• Mem: 775580k
• Swap: 1951856k

if you need info about the debian packages installed on my Ubuntu Edgy system, see precedent post or leave a comment.

unpacked (grabbed from here. see also the source archive):

• tar xzf slviewer-src-20070112c.tar.gz
• tar xzf slviewer-linux-libs-20070112c.tar.gz
• tar xzf fmodapi375linux.tar.gz

copied required FMOD headers and libraries into the Second Life Viewer source tree:

• cd into the FMOD directory
• cp api/inc/* ../linden/libraries/i686-linux/include/
• cp api/libfmod-3.75.so ../linden/libraries/i686-linux/lib_release_client/

copied other headers:

• export SLSRC=…/linden/
• cp -a /usr/include/atk-1.0 ${SLSRC}/libraries/i686-linux/include/
• cp -a /usr/include/gtk-2.0 ${SLSRC}/libraries/i686-linux/include/
• cp -a /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/include/* ${SLSRC}/libraries/i686-linux/include/gtk-2.0/
• cp -a /usr/include/glib-2.0 ${SLSRC}/libraries/i686-linux/include/
• cp -a /usr/lib/glib-2.0/include/* ${SLSRC}/libraries/i686-linux/include/glib-2.0/
• cp -a /usr/include/pango-1.0 ${SLSRC}/libraries/i686-linux/include/

i’m using slviewer-linux-libs so i don’t need other headers or libs

i edited the client-manifest-i686 file in indra/newview/linux_tools decommenting two kdu-related lines

at 1st try i got an error about cairo not found, so i also did:

• cp -a /usr/include/cairo/* ${SLSRC}/libraries/i686-linux/include/

note: the leading spaces from the 6 ‘ ../libraries/’ strings from around line 187 onwards were already the removed for me in the indra/SConstruct file

then i get into the indra directory and start building (15.00 italian time):

• scons DISTCC=no BTARGET=client BUILD=releasefordownload

two hours and half later, the build is complete.

i extract the resulting bz2 archive, but app_settings lacks lots of files.
i made some mistake but i don’t know what.

instead, i can succesfully run the client from the source tree. veery slow. so i try

• cp “$SLSRC/libraries/i686-linux/lib_release_client/libllkdu.so” “$SLSRC/indra/newview/libllkdu.so”
• mkdir “$SLSRC/indra/lib”
• cp “$SLSRC/libraries/i686-linux/lib_release_client/libkdu_v42R.so” “$SLSRC/indra/lib/libkdu_v42R.so” -i

and then it runs good!
complete build output follows.

strip -S -o newview/secondlife-i686-bin-stripped newview/secondlife-i686-bin
strip -S -o linux_crash_logger/linux-crash-logger-i686-bin-stripped linux_crash_logger/linux-crash-logger-i686-bin
rm -rf newview/SecondLife_i686_1_13_1_7* && newview/linux_tools/package-client.sh linux_tools/client-manifest-i686 SecondLife_i686_1_13_1_7 default
Checking manifest…
Done.
[: 47: SecondLife_i686_1_13_1_7: unexpected operator
Building newview/SecondLife_i686_1_13_1_7 directory…
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator

cp: target `SecondLife_i686_1_13_1_7/app_settings/*’ is not a directory
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
cp: target `SecondLife_i686_1_13_1_7/character/*’ is not a directory
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
cp: target `SecondLife_i686_1_13_1_7/fonts/*’ is not a directory
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
cp: target `SecondLife_i686_1_13_1_7/help/*’ is not a directory
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
cp: target `SecondLife_i686_1_13_1_7/skins/*’ is not a directory
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
cp: target `SecondLife_i686_1_13_1_7/res-sdl/*’ is not a directory
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
[: 89: ==: unexpected operator
Done.
Pruning CVS directories from newview/SecondLife_i686_1_13_1_7 directory…
Done removing CVS directories.
Pruning .svn directories from newview/SecondLife_i686_1_13_1_7 directory…
Done removing .svn directories.
[: 111: ==: unexpected operator
Creating gridargs.dat for package, grid default
[: 120: SecondLife_i686_1_13_1_7.tar.bz2: unexpected operator
Creating tarball newview/SecondLife_i686_1_13_1_7.tar.bz2…
Done.
scons: done building targets.

unpacked:

• tar xzf slviewer-src-20070108c.tar.gz
• tar xzf slviewer-linux-libs-20070108c.tar.gz
• tar xzf fmodapi375linux.tar.gz

copied required FMOD headers and libraries into the Second Life Viewer source tree:

• cd into the FMOD directory
• cp api/inc/* ../linden/libraries/i686-linux/include/
• cp api/libfmod-3.75.so ../linden/libraries/i686-linux/lib_release_client/

installed via Synaptic:

• gcc-3.4 gcc-3.4-base g++-3.4 scons

Now, I am new to scons, and since I’m on Ubuntu Edgy -that uses gcc-4.1- I thought I had to do something like this (not sure this is right, I got the idea reading here), but actually we don’t need it:

• export CC=’/usr/bin/gcc-3.4′

after I learnt this in the Linux Client Users group chat (thanks you all guys!), I went to Maryport and enjoyed a compile’n'dance party while giving the magic command:

• scons DISTCC=no BTARGET=client BUILD=release

Then I got some errors, asked help to Linux Client fellows, then I installed:

• libglu1-mesa-dev libgl1-mesa-dev mesa-commons-dev
• flex bison

I tried again running scons, and as described here, compiler couldn’t find gtk/gtk.h
So I edited the indra/SConstruct file removing the leading spaces from the 6 ‘ ../libraries/’ strings from around line 187 onwards.

A couple of hours later…
…scons: done building targets.
One step further!

Then I ran it:

• ( cd newview && LD_LIBRARY_PATH=../../libraries/i686-linux/lib_release_client:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:/usr/local/lib  ./secondlife-i686-bin )

And it started! But it is “unable to initialize communications”:

The login page of the open-sourced client, showing a dumb error

My fault! I’m running it from inside the tree but I forgot to do this from the indra directory:

• $ cp ../scripts/messages/message_template.msg newview/app_settings/

And then it works! I’m in world!

A snapshot taken with the open-sourced client on Linux

A snapshot in the same location with the usual binary client

I am happy!

Next step:

packaging the client, substituting ‘BUILD=release’ with ‘BUILD=releasefordownload’ in the ‘Compiling’ section, in order to use the faster libkdu_v42R.so and libllkdu.so libraries.
…or maybe better, I’m going tryng to symlink the *kdu*.so’s into newview/ too so I shouldn’t need releasefordownload