Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely created by its Residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by millions of Residents from around the globe.

• From the moment you enter the World you'll discover a vast digital continent, teeming with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity. Once you've explored a bit, perhaps you'll find a perfect parcel of land to build your house or business.
  
  
• You'll also be surrounded by the Creations of your fellow Residents. Because Residents retain the rights to their digital creations, they can buy, sell and trade with other Residents.
  
  
• The Marketplace currently supports millions of US dollars in monthly transactions. This commerce is handled with the in-world unit-of-trade, the Linden dollar, which can be converted to US dollars at several thriving online Linden Dollar exchanges.

Here is a screen shot before I get into the installation and fixing a bug I found in the current linux beta release.

First, you should try to see if secondlife is available for the distribution you are using and use its installation method (rpm, deb, yum, apt-get, emerge, etc). If it is not, you can download it here. I would follow the installation instructions at the secondlife web site. If you have downloaded an older version, such as the one included with sabayon linux, the screen to run the game will show there is a newer version available as in the example picture above.

However, after updating to the latest version 1.18.5.3, I ran into some problems which I will cover later in this article.

Installation Overview

The first thing you need to do in order to play secondlife is to register an account. Clicking on the New Account button will bring you to the required screen which it opens in a browser window. You can do the registration at the web site and you will be given the option to download the client...so having the client installed is not an option to register for the game:

You chose an online screen name. Enter some personal identifying information about yourself such as your birthdate and your email address. Your email address must be valid.

In the next screen, you chose your avatar, whether or not your online virtual identity will be male or female, and your basic looks (which can be modified later in the game):

In the next image, you fill in some more personal information:

Then in the next screen, you can upgrade to a premium account which has features not included with the basic account. I chose to not do the premium account.

In the next image, it gives you your account overview:

In the next image, you can download the secondlife linux client if you don't already have it.

In the next image, you have to login once to your account in order for the client login to work. Here is that screen shot:

After you login online, you are supposed to be able to use your login id and password to login through the client. Here is the client window again so you can refresh your memory:

Fixing a Bug

This is what was happening on my computer when I attempted to login using the Linux client with my registered username and password:

Basically, once the loading the license agreement screen would appear, it would just stall. Because I ran the secondlife-bin file from a terminal, I was able to see an error message that stated "LLSDXMLParser::Impl::parse: XML_STATUS_ERROR parsing head

Here is an image showing the error:

The fix is relatively easy. It seems the linux client is really not the problem, but the coding used on the web site is the problem and has malformed XML code. So the fix is to set the secondlife.com web site to 127.0.0.1 in your /etc/hosts file which will allow you to bypass the user agreement, which is only ran for the first time you login. The way I did it was to use the echo command as the root user like so:

# echo "secondlife.com 127.0.0.1" >> /etc/hosts
[/code]

Here is an image showing the command being run:

Next, restart the game and login using the client interface. It will skip the user license agreement. After you use the client to login one time, you can remove the entry from the /etc/hosts file you created in the previous step.

I have several more images, but I plan on doing a video sometime this evening....so check back and I will have this article updated. One more image with the entire linux client console during game play:

The game supports voice chats and other features too, however, I didn't try them out. I did try out the streaming media features, which you can enable or disable. One tip I can provide, you have to spend some time exploring the first world before you are given the opportunity to move on. I didn't actually record how long it was, but I would guess a good hour or two. The first world is a tutorial on using text chats, gestures, moving around by walking, flying, or in vehicles. Eventually I made it to a place that stated it was for adults...and well, the content did have some female nudity in the form of pictures inside a storefront.

Spend some time in the game, because the longer you spend playing the game, the more opportunities seem to surface and you are allowed to do more and more.

I will get the video up soon....hopefully this evening.