Linux noob, banging head on wall

Ok, I'm a sucker. I bought into the idea of open source software and loaded ubuntu studio on my laptop. So long as I'm only using mozzila or open office, everything is mostly fine. Then, after a week of messing around with some music software I decided to try to get sl running.

I first tied the version available from the debian package manage.

But it was too old. New viewer required.

So I download the version off the sl webpage (the one that is up right now), and extract it into my games folder.


After trying to figure out which file actually runs the program I am gleefully seeing the loging screen. I log in. I think, oh boy! But, then it immediatly crashes after being logged in for about 30 seconds. It crashes my whole system, and I have to do a hard shut down (cut the power to the pc) This all pisses me off because I thought the whole point of unix based systems was that the program would crash instead of the whole system.

Based on reading the readme, it looks like I''m having a graphics card driver problem. I go to the support pages, and there is infor for every brand of card except the one in my laptop, an intel something or other, which I can't even look up because ubuntu does not seem to recognize my

Now I read that, even if I overcome this problem that voice may not work, etc...

I'd like to figure out how to make it work rather than reinstall windows.

So, will someone please hold my hand and show me how to do this right? If I see rtfm one more time Im gonna puke. I've spent well over 70 hours trying to get various programs to work, several ending in fail. Is there anyone out there willing to instruct a total linux noob how to do this? I'm feeling I made a poor decision in getting rid of xp, but I'd like to make this linux thing work!

Please. I'm begging.

Let's make a start hey?
Ubuntu studio, http://ubuntustudio.org/ is one I haven't looked at before. The main page says sorry about the lack of real-time kernel. That's something a sound studio can't do without.

You will have to nut out the video chipset with searches to see if it can work for someone else. Not necesarily SL but 3D in general. Does glxgears work at all?

As for voice, I haven't got it to work after several attempts but I have no friends anyway so it's a moot point for me.
And video streaming. I thought I had that working at one stage but again, can't use that either because of my 256k line.

Good luck with it though and welcome to Linux. Yes Linux can be tough sometimes but for me the alternative is worse.

Sorry to hear you're having problems. You are quite right, Linux is (or should be) a rock-solid operating system and SL should *not* take down the whole system.

I too have not looked at *buntu (of any flavour) and have SL running quite successfully, including voice on Mandriva. I do know that there are several people running SL successfully on standard Ubuntu here.

So, some things to note:

1. You might need a proprietary graphics driver to make the game work successfully. I have nvidia cards and always get the latest nvidia driver from the Mandriva repository. If you have an nvidia card, I am sure you can similarly get the driver from the Ubuntu repositories.

If you are right in what you say about Intel there is good news in that Intel suport the open source world very well, but I am not sure of the 3D capabilities of these cards in any OS. I had a laptop with an Intel card that shared system memory and it was a dog playing SL. So, it might be that you have a graphics card issue. If it's a deskptop and you have the graphics card built into the motherboard you want, no need, to go and get a PCI express or AGP card depending on the mobo. I would recommend nvidia as they support Linux well with binary drivers. ATI have opened up their source code but I *think* they still trail nvidia for Linux drivers for this sort of application. I am happy to be told otherwise by SL players though. Anyway up, a 7k or 8k series nvidia card depending on your budget will work. Get one with as much memory as you can afford and as fast as you can afford.

2. It's very easy to get SL to run, but it's just a case of understanding that you are starting a shell script, not clicking on an exe file as in Windows. It's just getting used to a slightly different way of working. All I ever do is download the compressed archive, uncompress it to my installs directory (you can do it anywhere) by right clicking on the file and saying Extract | Extract Here. This then produces a subdirectory with a file simply named secondlife. Now, I assume Nautilus which I *think* is the file manager in Gnome can do the same as konqueror in KDE in this respect.

3. Voice *will* work. You need to make sure that:

a. Alsamixer has the capture turned right up
b. You choose OSS for the sound capture in SL voice preferences.
c. Whatever Gnome uses to control the mic levels has the mic levels turned up
d. You need to replace libopenal.so.1 in the lib subdirectory of wherever you uncompressed the tarball with one that works. Search the archives here for where to get it.

I assume that you installed Ubuntu Studio because you want to get involved in Multimedia? It is the case that any decent Linux distribution will have these programs in their repository and they will be easy to install so you might want to try either standard Ubuntu or Mandriva 2008.1 - not 2009.0 - (which is every bit as newb friendly and gives you the choice between KDE or Gnome on install). Sometimes you just find that a different flavour of Linux is better for your hardware. Ubuntu is not the only Linux distribution and you may find you like KDE better than Gnome for example. One of the many fantastic things about Linux is choice.

All in all, don't think you've made the wrong choice with Linux. Once you have learned the differences you will find it a much faster, more pleasant computing experience.

www.linuxquestions.org is a fantastic place for general Linux questions, the Ubuntu forum for Ubuntu specific questions and the Mandriva forum is very friendly and helpful for Mandriva issues.

Oh, btw, I have suddenly found that version SecondLife_i686_1_20_17_98669 is suddenly very very flaky and really causing my computers to go very slow. I have downloaded the latest rlease candidate SecondLife-i686-1.22.3.105377 and that seems to have helped no end.

Hope that helps. Don't let anyone tell you to RTFM! If you find people are taking that attitude try somewhere more friendly and helpful. In general these days the Linux community is very glad to help people out. Good luck!

Can i ask where you got your debian package from?

I've been maintaining up-to date packages for debian and with help of others for ubuntu for over a year and they are kept upto date, we have the last release and the latest RC.

http://www.byteme.org.uk/secondlife/apt-get-a-secondlife.html

ps i use to be known as Michelle2 Zenovka

I'm running SL under Kubuntu 8.04 on a HP desktop with a dual core Pentium chip and max memory and a DSL connection with good results.

Two keys: A good video card (mine is an Nvidia 7600 GS with the proprietary nvidia drivers) and a good sound card (mine a Soundblaster, upper end).

With that I am able to spend hours in-world without crashing. My Visa running friends seldom manage an hour without crashing out.

Sound, including ambient and media (audio and video) work fine.

Voice will SOMETIMES work, but actually once you get it working it looses it's attractiveness - texting gives you a scroll-back ability which can be important when several people are talking at the same time.

Stick with it. Work one problem at a time and be ready to provide details of when and how things go wrong. We can't help if we don't really know what's going on.

Arrow, which Soundblaster card do you have please?

Not sure. Bought it used. I'll crack the case and give it a look, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.

I *do* know that in discussing it with the friend who runs the store/shop it was a 'mainstream' soundblaster - we figured it would give Linux the least problems. And it's worked quite well.

Went ahead and pulled it. It's a Sound Blaster Model CT4870.

After much consideration, I have decided to go back to xp. The staw on the camels back was that it would not recognize my roland keyboard when it was plugged in as a usb storage device. I may keep a partition to mess with different distributions, but I've abandoned hopes of being a linux only user. Hopefully after a few years of messing with linux for fun I can seriously consider actually using it for work and play, but for now it will remain an entertaining way to kill time.

Arrow, thanks.

For future occasions like this, have a look here:

http://www.howtoforge.com/dmidecode-finding-out-hardware-details-without-opening-the-computer-case

dmidecode is a fantastic CLI program that will list all the stuff on your Linux machine so you don't have to open the case.

Pieter, sorry to hear you're giving up. Hopefully we'll see you back on Linux the next time a virus causes yet another Windows reinstall!

For the voice trouble test out this: /263/57/291380/1.html

yep, its easier to stick with what you know.. it always seems to work better, cuz you know how to do what you want... its why Windows is still so widely used, most people don't give a crap what their computer is running as long as they can do what they want to do.

I've been running SL on Fedora Core (7 and then 9) since I joined SL. Don't know about Ubuntu or Mandriva (though I've heard good things), but Fedora is an extremely easy install. From there I downloaded the NVidia drivers for my 7600GT from nvidia.com and followed their installation instructions (relatively painless, though they DO require a reboot or two). After that it's just a matter of downloading SL from the website's download page, extracting, and running the SecondLife*/secondlife script.

Maybe I was just lucky enough to have hardware and a distribution that happened to be very compatible. Everything after that was icing on the cake. For example, I now extract new versions into ~/local and create a symlink called ~/local/SecondLifeRC that points to the extracted release candidate viewer. ~/bin/slrc simply exports BROWSER so SL always uses Firefox and runs ~/local/SecondLifeRC/secondlife, and I have a desktop shortcut that runs 'slrc'. That makes updating to new versions very painless.

EDIT: Oh. One thing I would recommend is NEVER running SL in full screen mode in Linux (I guess I haven't tried it recently, but it used to be a problem). Run in windowed mode instead and simply maximize the window.

----

CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 4000+
Memory: 2012 MB
OS Version: Linux 2.6.27.9-73.fc9.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Dec 16 14:54:03 EST 2008 x86_64
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 7600 GT/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2 NVIDIA 177.82

Give it time, Microsoft announced on Christmas that they want to charge per hour for use. niiiiice.

As for the voice issue I am experiencing a good level of success even with the latest Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), using the latest SLim Viewer.

http://secondlife.com/SLim/

I had to set my input to 'OSS' as I usually have been forced to do in the past.

I can hear people quite clearly, which is all I care about tbh, some people in SL exclude others for not using voice in groups. One person even announcing, to the group in a welcome area "I will not speak to anyone unless I have spoken to them on voice". Quite ignorant in my opinion, but I still like to know whats going on around me in any case.

Apparently there are 2680 files in 81 folders.... Mind telling me which is the right one? I try opening the obvious ones but no luck so far.. Thanks.

Its the one simply called Second life.

On my system it was next to the SL icon