An Option I Would Like To See In Every Application

It runs like ass on my graphics card+driver combination (and even pops up a message saying that my setup is unsupported) but at least it’s running! That’s OpenMetaverse Viewer, previously known as SecondLife Viewer. Linden Labs are trying to make SecondLife completely Free Software, their client has been for a while and their servers are completely Debian-based, but due to a) proprietary third-party code they’re not allowed to liberate and must replace, and b) their desire for every server to be able to communicate with each other (and thus not fracture the users into camps) it is taking a while.

Some particularly zealot-like Free Software people have made their own server called OpenSim, so to try and get rid of trademarks/company names/etc. the Free Software SecondLife viewer is now OpenMetaverse Viewer and can connect to SecondLife and OpenSim servers.

Since Ubuntu was being a bit of a pain I’ve gone back to Debian, unstable to be precise, but if you want to install omvviewer (found here) then you’ll need some packages from testing which can be found here. Specifically you’ll need “xulrunner”, “libxul-common”, “libxul0d”, “libnss3-0d” and “libmozjs0d” which are all to do with Mozilla’s XULRunner (the thing Firefox is made in) since that can apparently be embedded in the virtual worlds.