Open Source and Linux in Second Life

The linux viewer has had its ups and downs in Second Life. But recently with not much going on in the viewer, it seems to have been rather stable (at least 1.18.3.5 on an Ubuntu 7.10 system). LinuxWorld interviews some of the developers of the client and lead developer Tofu Linden on the project.

I must say that recently? The game play has been a lot better than the previous few times that I’ve had to handle the game in Linux. For a while, the viewer would be stable and then updates to things that had nothing to do with the parts that crashed would inflict crashing…. then fixes would create more crashes. Was a true pain to get working.

These days, the only pains you have to deal with usually are whether or not your graphics card is supported when it comes to ATI and nVidia drivers, and eventually they’ll put in a voice standard. What’s interesting is that they really should be using something like openH323 or some sort of SIP standard since that’s a lot easier to implement than whatever they use currently. At least from an open source perspective. Either way though, the stability of client has drastically improved due to a number of independent developers working with Tofu and some avid linux users always testing the client and sending in feedback through the forums.

Great interview on how open source is affecting the Second Life community and how it’s changing with its Linux community.