Howto: install SL in /usr/local/games

Been having a play at getting SL to behave a bit more nicely on a multiuser system like mine. Doubtless Linden will improve the client a bit to make this unnecessary, but anyway, install it like so:

cd /usr/local/games
tar jxvf ~lum/SecondLife_1_8_2_9.tar.bz2
cd SecondLife-linux-02012006
mkdir default
cd default
cp -a ../SecondLife .
ln -s /usr/local/games/SecondLife-linux-02012006/app_settings app_settings
ln -s /usr/local/games/SecondLife-linux-02012006/character character
ln -s /usr/local/games/SecondLife-linux-02012006/featuretable.txt featuretable.txt
ln -s /usr/local/games/SecondLife-linux-02012006/fonts fonts
ln -s /usr/local/games/SecondLife-linux-02012006/help help
ln -s /usr/local/games/SecondLife-linux-02012006/secondlife /usr/local/bin/secondlife

Then edit /usr/local/games/SecondLife-linux-02012006/secondlife and change it to the following

#!/bin/sh
if ! [ -d ~/.sl ]; then
        mkdir ~/.sl
        cp -a /usr/local/games/SecondLife-linux-02012006/default/* ~/.sl
fi
cd ~/.sl
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/games/SecondLife-linux-02012006/lib /usr/local/games/SecondLife-linux-02012006/bin/secondlife-bin 2>&1 | tee ~/.sl/SecondLife/logs/lastrun.log

That should cause any user who runs SL to get their own private settings. You may want to copy in a settings.ini into the default profile so that the GraphicsMemory is correct and so on. I'm also toying with the idea of having the cache directory symlinked to somewhere like /tmp/sl/$USER

Okay... I feel stupid now. It never occured to me to work around the global install issue that way. I'll go take a crack at assembling a Slackware package and see if I can get one of the other Dropline devs to test it before I tell anyone. (Slackware users will at least be able to "just" install it and go, as well as stand a chance of uninstalling it for later upgrading.)

I despise having things not accounted for in the package inventory.

...and now I've got a package for Slackware 10.2 that appears it should work properly (or as properly as the client is going to work) which I need to wait until I get to my home PC to test.
Complete with png icon and FDO-compliant .desktop file.

It basically took about 30 minutes to put together a custom bootstrap script (using Lum's idea), write the package build script, and double- and triple-check everything. Because of the way I do stuff, upgrading it should just be a matter of changing the VERSION variable and running the build script again, so now I'm pretty sure that distro maintainers won't have anything like a major task of properly packaging client bins to comply with their filesystem layouts.