Installing SL in a 64 bit System

I have just spent the last six hours trying to make an SL viewer - ANY SL viewer - work under my 64 bit Fedora.

No, really.

Nothing works. Not building from source. Not installing the dependencies it lists. Not even trying third party viewers that claim to support 64 bit systems.

The ./secondlife script suggests several packages to install for compatibility, which is great.. if you're using Ubuntu. Anyone else is left completely in the dark, and it only gets worse from there.

The libraries that SL claims to need* range from incredibly old libraries found only in < F8, to libraries found only in the alpha distro, F11, to libraries *that don't seem to exist yet*. I have gotten extensive support from the folks at #fedora, one of whom was surprised SL worked on my 32 bit system at all - and I STILL cannot make this thing run. (currently, it seg faults)

When building from source SL demands deprecated programs that I cannot find in .rpm form and cannot build from source for their own reasons. It is like a web of nightmares, I kid you not.

Seriously, what is the deal? Needing 32 bit compatibility libraries I can understand... but what is with the impenetrable nightmarish tangle I have to go through to get them? Why don't I get a nice list of libraries like people who use Ubuntu apparently do? And what is with the program apparently needing libraries that aren't even written? Can I ask any more questions without getting really annoying?

* find . -type f -exec file '{}' \; |grep ELF |cut -f1 -d: > SL-ELF-bins.txt; cat SL-ELF-bins.txt|xargs ldd |grep found |sort -u|awk '{print$1}'

Hi there, did you check on OMV? If not I'd give that a try.
http://omvviewer.byteme.org.uk/

Yes, I have tried omv.

Like the SL viewer, it only offers packages for Debian-based distros. Also like the SL viewer, it is virtually impossible to compile from source. Certainly much easier than SL viewer... until it asks for xmlrpc-epi - a package that was never made available on Fedora and will not compile from source for bizarre XML errors. Actually I managed to get a xmlrpc-epi package and install it, but despite an apparently successful install omv still cannot find the library.

I'm running the bleating edge 64 bit Kubuntu Jaunty beta. I've installed all the viewers I could find to see if I could find a stable one. Here's my rundown of what's worked, and what hasn't.

Second Life Official - Had to install 32 bit libs. On 'buntu they've made it realtively painless to do so. All I had to do was install the ia32-libs package and off it went. Runs kinda flakey though. Likes to crash with streaming audio, and don't even think about voice.

Cool SL Viewer - Same experience as the offical client.

Meerkat & Imprudence - Even less stable, but they run.

Open Metaverse Viewer - This one's the business. Added the repository to 'buntu's apt sources and it installed the 64 bit version without a problem. Noticeably more stable than the offical client. Streaming video doesn't want to work, still no voice, and the odd streaming parcel still sends it to segfault land. Typically runs for a couple hours at a time without crashing though...

I'm guessing from your posts that "just install a 'buntu" isn't the answer you're looking for though. When I was researching different clients, I saw some posts about Fedora problems. The only seemingly surefire way to get SL up on Fedora is reinstall the whole distro as 32 bit.

If you can't stomach reinstalling, and you have the extra hard drive space - there may be another option. Install the 32 bit version of whichever Fedora you're using on a different partition. Then use it as a ginormous chroot jail to run SL from.

Of course, I'm assuming 32 bit Fedora has all the libraries you need to begin with...

I think Henri runs on Mandriva that should support RPM unlike Ubuntu and the Debian alikes. But he's not doing 64bit versions. But perhaps you could gain some info from looking at the build scripts?

http://sldev.free.fr

It does - as I implied (very vaguely, though) in my first post, I had this running fine on my 32 bit Fedora.

It's good to know that the client DOES work on a 64 bit system; on the other hand, the apparent difference between distros is absolutely baffling, especially in regards to .so versions. I wonder if the output I am getting is just plain wrong, and I'm missing some kind of magical program or programs that install the same libs as ia32libs?

I have no problem with using omv (and thank you muchly for testing a few of the viewers out), and I was installing most of the libs without a problem until I ran into that xmlrpc-egi mess; again, baffling, as it seems to conflict with xmlrpc-c... a dependency for cmake, the program I need in order to compile omv. Yikes!

I can and may end up running 32 bit Fedora as a VM - but I'd really prefer to avoid it if possible. It would also be really ace if I could get this running under 64 bit Fedora, as it may help others out.

It seems that the SL Viewer, at least, will look in its own libs/ folder for the libs that it needs. Anyone think it may be possible to package SL with the libs it needs right in the folder?

EDIT: I've got omvviewer compiled now, along with the artwork, but it crashes on startup. At least the window pops up, which is the most progress I've made so far.

If/when I get this thing working I am *so* making an .rpm.

64-bit support, in general, sucks ass. Driver support is abysmal, and software support is nearly non-existent; and this goes for both Linux and Windows. The worst part is, a lot of people are perfectly content running with less than 4GB of memory. Don't look to Microsoft for help, either. Historically, each new version of Windows required people to run out and double their memory; however, Windows 7 actually runs just fine on memory that would make Vista choke. Because of this, I wouldn't expect 64-bit support to improve much in the foreseeable future.

FWIW, 64-bit Ubuntu actually works pretty well, especially if one has the IA32 compatibility libraries installed. I've heard they even have Flash working now. Unfortunately, it appears the same can't be said for other, particularly non-Debian, distros. From what I'm seeing here, 64-bit Fedora and other RPM-based distros are not well supported at all.
64-bit Gstreamer is a flaky thing all on its own. I am a bit perplexed about lack of voice support, however.

I have been able to get voice working on Hardy Heron x64 by patching libvivoxsdk.so (that problem is supposed to have been fixed in the 1.22 viewers, but worth checking if you're not even seeing SLVoice showing up in your process list) and doing my silly workaround to force it to use Pulseaudio's OSS emulation since OpenAL didn't play nice with ALSA (and still doesn't, though it is much better than it used to be), so I know voice on 64-bit is possible.

But you're running Kubuntu, so you're likely not even using Pulseaudio at all. Are you using ALSA? Or do you have Phonon running? Try seeing what happens if you kill your sound daemon and use ALSA instead.

compat-libstdc++.

..that was all I needed left to get it working.

So, after I explode from frustration*, any suggestions on where to head from here? I know 64 bit support is icky, but getting it running AT ALL should not be such a feat just because it's not Ubuntu**. I'd like to compile a list of packages and include it on a wiki, or SOMEThing. Hey, maybe even include it in the program like Ubuntu's package list is. I have no idea how things work at Linden Labs, so does anyone know what my most viable options are?


*yeah, it's hyperbole, but daaang, seriously? Six hours because there was no information about what packages to install? That's just not right. ):
**I don't have Ubuntu envy I SWEAR. It's just that... sniff... if Fedora was a little bit better cared about there'd be a lot fewer problems... D';

I should clarify that I haven't tried very hard to resolve any of the issues I've had yet. I've only recently gotten sucked back into SL, now that I have a machine that can handle it.

I've got a little list of the various fixes people try. On my next day off, I'm going to try mucking with them. Kubuntu Jaunty *is* using Pulse, so I'm going to first try routing ALSA through it and see what happens...

Getting streaming multimedia up and working would be nice though. On this mythical day off I keep hearing about, I'm going to try trawling the SL client's logs to see if it's missing a codec or something.

If you can, like, provide an easy list of compat packages for 64-bit Fedora users, I'll happily include the list in the readme.

Unfortunately because I did try a lot of things, these would need to be tested to make sure the list is complete, but I did compile a list of major packages I installed. If anyone wants to help test these:

glib2
gtk2
libXt
ffmpeg-devel
ortp-devel
freealut-devel
faad2-libs
compat-libstdc++

It should be the i386 versions for all of them.

These may actually be more than what is necessary; again, I need to figure out a way to test this. I theoretically can do VM, but Virtual Box has... issues.. with providing a decent graphics card, so that may make SL explode all on its own.

Thanks for the help, all. I'll post back with results from a VM attempt.

EDIT: Excuse me, I'm being stupid. I'm going to install a HDD tonight to use as a testing grounds for Fedora 11 beta; I'll just install my Fedora 10 on it first and test SL before moving on to beta.

If any fedora users want to assist in helping me create some packages of the omvviewer i will be happy to host them, but i don't have fedora to build and test with (although i could chroot a distro) but i've never packaged on fedora either.


BTW as for compiling from source, i've got a greatly improved build system in place for omvviewer now, which is essentially grabbing the source and running make, some details are at http://omvviewer.byteme.org.uk/source.shtml. Of cause you still need the required dependencies. but it should be down to some pretty minimal commands you can just copy and paste

I also tried to install SL for 64 bit but I gave up. Im new to Linux and didn't want all the trouble with figuring out what to install, and I was unsure how to unstall it if it wouldn't work.

So I installed Ubuntu 32 bits instead and SL worked perfectly. I had just started with Ubuntu anyway so it didn't matter if I changed system anyway.

I just compiled a 64bit version of Imprudence (nonstandalone) you can give that a try and let me know how it goes. A list of issues I know of is on that thread.

http://imprudenceviewer.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=214&p=1274#p1274

Honor, just FYI, the 32 bit version worked for me once I had those deps installed. The basic codebase seems pretty similar to the SL viewer so it's not a huge surprise.

I did not get to install that HDD as planned, it should be forthcoming this weekend, when I can hopefully test some of this stuff out and help everyone with their respective viewers.

The trick is to uninstall Firefox (64 bit version) and install the 32 bit version and reboot--there are notes out on the net on how to do it which is basically adding the 32 bit repository entry for Fedora When you try to run SL(so it from a terminal windows so you can see the missing dependencies) and get errors for what is not found, do a yum install for the individual so files not found(yum will find the full package for you by just trying to install the missing .so files. If I remember right, it is like 4-6 times that you have to install some individual ones but it will work. There is a problem with libmozill so you have to do the 32 bit version of Firefox to fix that.Mu

I saw a message when I got the segfault that mentioned libmozill, but I never installed 32 bit Firefox and it still works, so I'm not entirely sure 32 bit Firefox is required. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you said though?

I use the linux client and run it right out of the folder you download. At first I was using the ATI 9.3 driver, but for some reason whenever I started SL there were a bunch of vibrant, solid colours eminating from the centre of the screen. I tried the SL Viewer and OMV. After numerous configurations and readjustments, I installed the 9.1 driver and the SL Viewer ran just fine. I can do voice, send/rcv files, change appearance, and I teleported to a bunch of different worlds.

My signature has my specs so I hope that helps determine compatibility or execution issues. I'd like a nice current .deb but this will just fine for now.

I cured it by installing a specialty version of Firefox that was created for Linux people to be running Firefox 1 and 2 at the same time. That worked to get around it. I think basically anything that has the 32 bit Mozilla libraries will do the same thing. It might also depend on the distribution that you are running since I am doing Fedora. Mu

SL v 1.22.11 (113941) runs fine for me, right "out of the box", so to speak.

No problems really, whatsoever.

Except for voice. Never works. Never ever. SL sees my mic (the meter fluctuates as I speak into it under prefrences>>voice chat>>device settings), until I log in. After that, it is hosed. I think this is Vivox's fult though, not LL's.

As a solution, I've been running SLVoice.exe in wine. Actually, "solution" isn't really a very good for this. It only sorta works, sometimes.

I'm running Fedora Core 10 x86_64.

on

Intel Core 2 Extreme Q6850
4GB DDR2
Nvidia 8800 GTX

I did install a bunch of different 32bit libraries, as I had to in order to get some software of mine (Maya) to run.

Also, if you've got an Nvidia card, make sure you're USING THE DRIVER FROM NVIDIA. 3rd party drivers are bunk.

Your 64-bit CPU means it's future compatible when the software catches up to the architecture. Right now, 64-bit environments are only for people who have software that won't run in 32-bit; anything else, especially on an entertainment desktop, is asking for a world of pain.

You are SOL if you want to stick with 64-bit.

I understand that Kitasu got a viewer working. However, the title of this thread lends itself to a lot of possiblities

So in light of that, I wrote a How-To for building from source over at Imprudence.
http://imprudenceviewer.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=227

The build script and how-to have only been tested with Imprudence so far. But, it may help you with your builds, eventually I hope to make it more encompassing. If you try and use it with the official source and comment on it there, please say so in the post what source and patches you use.

Mozlib support is of course hit or miss as I have Mozlib installed on my system but, I still don't get the html login page or search page to work.

I won't be keeping this thread updated with changes unless it is something major. As this site is for official source help and such.

I respectfully disagree.
If you install the compatibility libs and make sure that your libs are in order,
SL on Fedora 64 bit works as well as the Linux viewer works in 32 bit mode,
which is to say, problems with sound and voice persisting and certain hardware
effects crashing the viewer (like transparent desktop effects), and minimizing the
linux viewer is not recommended.
Having 4 gigs of usable memory rocks, and my system is blazingly fast.
It's not for those that are easily frustrated by problems though, I will agree with that.
That will have to change, and eventually LL will have to support 64 bit linux as well.

Thanks for proving my point that 64-bit operating systems aren't ready for the desktop.