Fleep's Deep Thoughts Explore the Metaverse

Confession:  It’s been so long since I logged into my blog, I momentarily forgot the password.  Yikes!

I’ve had my head buried in work, house repairs/maintenance, family stuff, and when I have spare moments – OpenSim.  I intend to write up my first try at installing OpenSim in grid mode sometime soon (I’ll skip the part about it taking a weekend to rebuild a box to use a server, hello Blue Screen of Death, not nice to see ya so often), but in the meantime, this week I walked a group of educators through the installation of OpenSim on their personal PC to create their own private OpenSim sandbox, and I thought I’d share the slides:

Note that this guide skips all of the networking configuration that would be required for someone else to log into your sim.  This is intended to be an entirely private sandbox for only your own personal use.

Why would you want that?  Well, a couple of reasons.

First, if you’re a virtual worlds or Second Life enthusiast, watching the console and seeing what’s happening on the back end when you’re rezzing a prim or changing clothes or running a script is endlessly fascinating.  It’s like seeing your virtual experience through the Matrix.  It boggles my mind to imagine what that looks like for Second Life, with hundreds of thousands of users and transactions and activity.

Second, anyone who builds or creates content in Second Life really SHOULD be able to save a local copy of their work to their personal machines.  With OpenSim you can do that, indeed, you can back up objects and whole sims, and re-import them wherever you like.  I think from this point forward, I intend not to build a single thing IN Second Life ever again – I’ll do all my creation work on my sandbox and then import it in to Second Life when it’s done.  That way I really DO own my content.

Finally, installing even the most simple instances of OpenSim gives you a new appreciation for the service Linden Lab (and Reaction Grid and InWorldz and all the other grids out there) provides.  This is not trivial stuff, and in the aggregate, it’s important to understand the sheer complexity of what running the Main Grid must be like – running your own OpenSim installation helps give you a sense of that complexity in a way that 7 years of being a Resident did not.

I hope the tutorial is helpful and I’d encourage you to give it a try even if you consider yourself to be a “non-techie” sort.  It’s strange and disorienting to find your poor Ruthed self on a little island all alone, but it’s also.. enchanting and exicting to know it’s your very own world to do whatever you like.

What will you create for yourself?  Go find out!