SL for Linux people

Second Life is a Place not a site

Second Life (abbreviated to SL) is an online virtual world. It contains geographic locations, avatars, a bazillion objects, it's own currency and an active economy. The content of this virtual world is imagined, created and owned by it's Residents. One analogy might be to think of it as a very large 3D wiki, where you can see and communicate with others viewing, adding or editing the content.

From a technical perspective SL is broken up into thousands of servers (called the Grid), a communications protocol that uses UDP and TCP, and a client (called a Viewer).

Each server generally provides 4 geographic regions (called a Sim). The Sims are populated by online users (called Residents) which are represented by an avatar. Almost any aspect of an avatar's appearance can be modified to the owner's liking. In almost every case, an avatar represents a real person in real time.

Second Life can be considered a metaverse with it's own day, night, wind, physics, land and water. Different people are in SL for different reasons.

Stuff in Second Life

Creators of content own the content they make and can choose what to do with it. Permissions on objects are very similar to unix permissions with User, Group and Other categories.

The tools to build objects are part of the SL viewer and available to all Residents. Objects in SL are built from 3D geometric shapes (called Prims) and apart from the shape can include a texture and a script. Prims can be grouped together to make complex objects. The scripting language used in SL is called Linden Scripting Language (LSL).

Objects can represent everything from buildings, trees and liquid to clothes, plasma, killer mech-bots and kittens. Objects can be bought and sold, belong to a group or given away.

What it looks like

Watching a few episodes of The Grid Review will give you an idea, and hopefully a few chuckles.

Click 'continue reading' to see how the installation is done