It seems as when the versions of second life increase Linux WineX compatibity decreases.
My first experience with SL was with 1.5x. My original computer was an IBM laptop running windowx XP with an ATI radeon mobility 7500 graphics card. Linden Labs specificly states that Second life will not work with this card. I tried and got many many windows screens of death.
I decided to dual boot my laptop with suse linux 9.2 then I decided to give WineX a shot. After everything was set up with WineX 3.2 the program ran FLAWLESSLY with ALL the features of the program. WIth a total of ZERO reported crashes EVER. Even with the graphics card that Linden Lab said did not work and did not work natively under windows. Needless to say I was impressed.
Enter a new computer....
I currently run a Athlon 64 3500+ socket 939 with 2 GB of Corsair Ram. The graphics engine is an Nvidia FX5700LE with 256mb video ram. The OS is Suse Linux 9.2.
Under WineX, With 1.5.x the game ran so fast, so stable, and so flawlessly that compared to my cousin who runs windows XP natively the emulated game blew him away in terms of performance and stability. The game ran with a PERFECT track record with no crashes whatsoever.
Enter the disaster *I* call 1.6. The game installed fine under the emulator. But then windowed mode never worked. This kinda irked me because I liked to multitask while playing secondlife. I finally tricked it to work in windowed mode and it was ok. Stability seemed to have taken a nosedive. The game would also crash at random but not too annoying intervals.
No more perfect trackrecord. But good enough to enjoy.
Enter 1.6.1 so it crashes everytime I run the program. It pops a crash screen everytime I try to close the program. This makes it impossible to change the settings such as local lighting and shiney objects. As it requires a clean restart. It also refuses to run in windowed mode OR fullscreen mode. The only way I can run the program is to force xserver to create its own virtual window. The crashreporter is super mega annoying... Im getting pissed.
I know that linden obviously does not support running its windows client in linux but it seems that the linux client is still currently vaporware and may be forever and It almost seems as If linden labs is trying to piss "me" off by making each update less and less compatable with winex emulation. All the meanwhile linden labs is using entire GRIDS of linux servers doing slave work for the MAC and WIndows Clients.
Just ranting...