Reading Radar

Remember the muppet who would come up on Sesame Street and try to sell people letters he had hidden in his coat? I’m going to play “OpenSim” muppet and sell you something for free. “You wanna buy a sim?” “A SIM?!” “SHHHHHH!” “a sim?” “Riiiiiiiiiiight…”

Interspersed with other blog posts most likely, I’ll be blogging about my experiences with getting OpenSim running on a Mac Pro (Quad Core, blah blah blah) under OS X 10.5.4.

At this point I should probably mention WHY I’m doing all this. As you probably know, IBM and LL jumped an avatar from SL into an IBM OpenSim, or vice versa, or both. You may also know that OpenSim is really looking like it could take the underlying LL simulator technology and make it gain widespread use and acceptance, hopefully in an interoperable manner with SL. In theory, people with fat pipes or good dedicated hosting setups could run their own sim, and people could hop between other sims on the grid in SL, and this OpenSim based sim.

Right now it’s all in its early days, but it’s fun to play with anyway. If nothing else, I can be a generic looking avatar on a sim of my own and guarantee that I can work on scripts and not be interrupted. Well.. I think I can. At this point, I’m not sure if OpenSim is backwards compatible with current LSL technology, or it’ll be mono only (that’s my guess) which is not deployed in SL yet, or what.

Anyway. Enough theorizing and pontificating.

There’s actually a few steps to getting it up and going. OpenSim requires Mono, the open source .net framework and c# language. On the OpenSim instructions for how to install on OS X, it links to an older version of Mono (1.2.5_5).

Unfortunately, this link refused to work, so I headed over to the mono site at mono-project.com to see what they had. Turns out they have a lot of download options.

They show 1.9.1_3 as the current version, but it also called it Mono 2.0 beta, so I decided to try an archive version. Unfortunately, none of their URLs worked either, but they all referenced ftp.novell.com, so I fired up Transmit and headed over there myself. I navigated to /pub/mono/archive/1.2.6/macos-10-universal/6 and downloaded the dmg for 1.2.6_6.

Tomorrow if I have time, I might try installing this and seeing what happens. Then once I install the OpenSim server on the Mac, I’ll even find out if that version of Mono is what I needed. Isn’t technology fun? Of course it is.