Saturday, July 31, 2010

Installing LL Viewer2 first things first

Welcome Back reader's
Today I will be describing how I have my test bed rig setup for these reviews. This particular machine has 2 hard drives, hda & hdb. / hda is a 160 gig Seagate consisting of Drives C:\ - D:\ - E:\
hdb is a 60 gig Maxtor used by the Linux distribution.
C:\ is a 4.8 gig boot loader and Windows Swap file partition, D:\ is a 10 gig partition used solely to handle the various Veiwer2 Cache files *note* it is very important to make individual cache files for each version of the viewer both Windows and Linux that I will be installing ! I can not stress the importance of this enough, mixing your cache files from one viewer to another can result in some very odd and undesirable side effect's. Therefore I have come to learn, never accept the default installation. E:\ will hold my V2 program files for Windows. On the D:\ drive I have created d:\SLStandardV2CacheWindows & d:\SLStandardV2CacheUbuntu
I have removed all previous installations of SL, ran 2 separate registry cleaners ( Glary Utilities free version http://www.glaryutilities.com/ and IoBit Software Advanced System Care free version http://www.iobit.com/ ) my next step was to defrag my Windows program files E:\ drive using IoBits Smart Defrag
Windows Installation:
Step#1 Install E:\Program Files\SecondLifeViewer2
Step#2 Start Viewer2 Click on the Me button and select Preferences / click on the Setup button
Browse to D:\SLStandardV2CacheWindows / click on Close button / select OK and restart V2

Step#3 open Preferences and verify that my Cache file pointer has been moved and continue
to make other adjustment's in the Preference's section.
Step#3 log into V2 and force my inventory to load / I am using an Alt Avatar with 11,000 items
relog several times and continue with the force inventory loading

UBUNTU Installation:
Step#1 Open SecondLife-i686-2.1.0.207030.tar.bz2 with Archive Manager and extract to Desktop / next I will mount my D:\ drive
Step#2 same as above / except : the Cache location will be D:\SLStandardV2CacheUbuntu
Step#3 same as above

Next I will install the Snow Globe Standard version / Snow Globe Experimental version and Kirstens version to separate directories IE: E:\Program Files\SecondLifeSnowGlobeStandard
E:\Program Files\SecondLifeSnowGlobeExperimental and E:\Program Files\SecondLifeKirstens I will also be creating individual Cache directories on the D:\ drive for each individual version IE: D:\SLKirstensV2CacheWindows and D:\SLKirstensV2CacheUbuntu and for the 2 Snow Globe versions.
Tomorrow I will begin testing, so stay tuned :_)

JayR Cela :_)

Linden Lab Viewer2 and the Open Source Alternatives

Greetings to everyone:_)
Due to recent events at LL in regards to SL and Viewer2. I have decided to reinstate this Blog and post here on a regular basis, with the purpose being to further the development of the Viewer2 project. Also since I am a long time SL builder there will also be occasional post's and picture's of my various building projects. Please feel free to post your comments and opinions here, I will not be moderating this blog ! It is yours to use freely, I do however ask that you respect your fellow readers, no vulgar language, no flame wars. I am here again for the sole purpose to make Viewer2 a success, and intend to devote as much time as possible towards this goal. So lets get started:_)

Yesterday Friday July 30 2010 I listened to Philip and BK Lindens meeting in regards to the future of SL. The one thing that stood out in my mind was LL admitting that V2 was and still has a very poorly designed User Interface, however the underlying code base allows for some very interesting and needed features. I have decided to focus on 4 different versions of V2.
#1 the Standard LL current version
#2 the Snow Globe Standard version
#3 the Snow Globe Experimental version
#4 the KirstenLee Cinquetti version

The test bed for all reviews will be done using an Intel Based Pentium 3 733mghz 756meg ram and Nvidia 7300 512meg video card, Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows XP Home SP3. I have decided to use this older hardware for two reasons. To many bad experiences with V2 borking my main rig, and I feel if this box is able to run V2 than anyone should be able to as well. This is not a set in stone decision, as V2 progresses into a more mature platform, I may change my mind, and install it to more modern hardware.

JayR Cela :_)