help with running second life in freespire

I am usually using windows XP but as of recently I seemed to have contracted a computer virus and I can't find the cd that came with my computer that contains all the firmware for my computer ranging from my soundcard to my eithernet card, so I was stuck having to use linux again, so anyways, how do I run second life on freespire?

Probably the same way you run it under any other distro.

Make a new folder in your home folder, download the .tar.bz2 file and unpack it into the folder you just made.

Create a link on your desktop to the secondlife file (it is a script) and run it.

To use voice, you need to have Esound (ESD) running as a root-level daemon, and PulseAudio running in your home session. If you are running KDE (you probably are), turn off Arts (KDE sound system). You also need a sound card and headset.

Oh, just a word of advice: please don't refer to being "stuck having to use Linux." We use if because we like an easy-to-use, stable, reliable operating system that doesn't get all the viruses, spyware and other malware that Windows gets. I've used Windows in the past, and I consider myself spoiled since I started using Linux.
(Why did you say you're using Linux instead of Windows?)

hey thanks, oh and I do apologize for the "stuck with using linux" comment, you see, I am a gamer, I have games that are windows only and I have always had a heck of a time getting wine to work, as for why I switched to linux this time around was because something went screwy with windows, and I needed to reformat, but could not find the disk with all the firmware for some of the hardware on my computer including my sound and internet cards, so I would be without sound and without internet access, and I knew linux has everything you need to get started right off the get go, and I enjoy the fact that freespire has most codecs like flash and stuff like that, so this is why I am using linux for now. but seriously, thankyou for the advice.

hey it works now, thanks ^v^

You're welcome, glad to help.

Btw, some of those windows-only games will run under Linux by using Wine. In fact, I got the Windows version of SL to work, including Voice.

Wine is currently in Release Candidate and is known to work with at least some mmorpg's (even some not listed at winehq.org). Install Wine and try it out. You might not be missing out on much, if anything.

well how do I use wine then, every time I try to launch steam from wine, it keeps saying there is another instance of steam running before it can finish updating, and winamp crashes on start up, I have never had any luck with that application sadly to say .

Okay, I just got through the process of installing both Steam and Winamp. Here's what happened:

Steam: I got the same error message you mention when I ran the Steam installer the first time. The way I fixed it was to re-run the installer and select the "Repair" option. I was able then to get to the point where you have to either connect to an existing account or create a new one. This included installing the Gecko engine for viewing and agreeing to the license agreement. Since I don't have a Steam account, and don't really want one, I stopped there. I suspect I would have to restart the installer if I wanted to actually sign up for a Steam account.

Winamp: I then downloaded and installed Winamp 5.53 (limited-time bundle with a free song). Everything there went perfectly.even to running Winamp, which automagically played that free song on startup.

I don't know why it would be crashing for you, unless either you have an old version of Wine that's not mature enough to run it properly (I use 0.9.66 (also known as 1.0 RC5), or there's something wrong with your sound system. In addition to the Alsa that runs on every Linux computer, I make sure I have Esound running as root daemon and PulseAudio running in my user account.

Since you're running Freespire, you should be running the latest version of Wine available on CNR.com. I looked there and they don't specify what version they're serving, but I notice that it is three months old. The version I'm using (downloaded from an OpenSUSE repository) was released by winehq.org the day before yesterday.

As a final note, I could not get Microsoft's installer program to install (kept getting an error message), but I was able to install Steam's .msi package by using Wine's built-in installer. The way I did it was to open a terminal/console and go to the folder where the Steam install file is. Then, I ran this command:
wine msiexec /i SteamInstall.msi

It worked very well.

As a final, final note, I noticed that today's Winamp (last time I used it was about 10 years ago!) looked a lot like a Linux program I sometimes use called Amarok.