Multiple -login on Ubuntu

Ok, here is the deal. I am trying out Ubuntu 8.10 and find it working rather well in most cases. It is still not ready for the masses in my opinion but it is getting there. I have SL running on my AMD64 version of Ubuntu and it is quite speedy compared to Vista (approx. 15 fps on average over Vista 64 bit which was maybe 7-8 fps over XP 32 bit) and overall I can't complain too much. I can even have multiple instances of SL running on the same machine which is teh awesome. The one thing I do miss however is the ability to do -login for separate instances of SL. By editing gridargs.dat file and adding -multiple I can run multiple instances just fine and I can even do -login for one instance the problem is do I need to install another instance of SL and edit its gridargs.dat file or is there a more elegant solution? I have done the second installation and I can actually get it to work for a few minutes before crashing. There has to be a better way. Vista and XP could do this quite well and I'd like to get this to work on Ubuntu as well.

What does -login do exactly? I mean, what is it supposed to do?

(and can anyone tell me why vB tags don't work here?)

it allows you to bypass the login screen. For instance you put in "-login Firstname Lastname password" (ie Kathmandu Gilman ******) in the griargs.dat file it automatically puts in your log in info and you don't see the log in screen. Using that I can create a launcher on my desktop that I double click and go directly into SL. On a windows machine I can set up a Desktop shortcut for each avatar and go directly into the game but with the griargs.dat file setup I can't seem to do that without multiple instances of SL. Kludgy way of doing things in my opinion plus it doesn't work without crashing anyway.

The forum's vBcode ability was largely turned off because of security problems that LL did not want to expend resources to solve. See the thread BBCode Emulation in Greasemonkey /327/b2/188445/1.html for some info and possible solution.

As to what -login does, see http://lslwiki.net/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=clientassetkeys in the old LSL wiki.

start sl with the arguments you want, then gridargs isn't processed.
eg from a console: ./secondlife --login firstname lastname secret
or rightclick your desktop, create a shortcut and fill in as command:
/path/to/your/secondlife --login firstname lastname secret

I get the error:

Second Life found an error parsing the command line.
Please see: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Client_parameters
Error: Non composing value with multiple occurences.

I figured it out, I took and renamed gridargs.dat to gridargsold.dat and it worked!!

Been up about 15 minutes now and no crashing so I think this is gonna work. Thank you very much for the help.

Great tip with command-line arguments, Armin!

Kathmandu, I was about to suggest that, with command-line arguments, gridargs.dat might be getting in the way, but looks like you've already figured that out.

The only downside I can see to doing something like this is that anyone who has access to your desktop profile can get right into your SL accounts, so if you're working in a less-than-secure environment (kids or curious hubbies/wives around), be sure to take the usual security precautions: Don't give your computer login information to anyone - not even your spouse! And remember to log out of or lock your workstation whenever you walk away from it.

And thanks for the quick replies on the -login argument. I'm learning something new every day here!

Good advice in general but not a concern here in my case.

but remember what the last announced security fix to the viewer was about : the possibility to access files on the harddisk. This would have included desktop shortcuts and bash history. It was said that the SL security hole was very unlikely to have been ever exploited when it was present. But other programs could have worse security holes. So saving plain text passwords together with where they are used is indeed not a good thing to do. Well, mabye not that risky if it is only stored for a SL account without L$ and no valuable inventory.