Hello to all and welcome to new group members (or visitors to my site)! I am writing to inform you about the series of Blender courses that will be starting September 7^th at 1pm SLT(PST). There will be 5 courses total sundays in the afternoons / evenings that will cover many of the hot topics in sculpty circles of late, namely baking and texturing, as well as other intermediate techniques I have learned from working with sculpties since they first appeared on the beta grid. If you are signed up for Google Calendar i have scheduled them in, link on bottom left page under ‘tutorials’.

They will start off by following roughly my in-world tutorials, and will quickly go through some of the basic introductory stuff to get to the really fun, albeit more advanced material. The courses this time around are not aimed at beginners in making sculpties, nor are they geared for people who have never opened Blender before.

I will be asking 10,000 L per student, and each applicant will have to submit an example of a sculpty they have created with Blender to be considered for registration. This course is designed for folks who have already gotten a handle on the Blender interface and are looking for ways to improve their sculpties with texturing and advanced modeling techniques. I am doing it this way to ensure those who register get the most possible out of the course.

Registration will start August 15^th and will be announced via several Second Life events. Once the courses have started no more SL events will be posted. If you can’t make it to any of the registration events than please IM or email me, whyroc@in2orbit.net

inworld:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Learning%20Pond/174/55/28

Thanks, whyroc

I have the OGP standalone server up and running which can be accessed here: http://gridrock.com:9000 It can be teleported to or logged into directly with the beta Open Grid viewer. I will attempt to keep it running as a sandbox and testing region if you are trying to access it and are not able, please contact me for trouble shooting.
Visitors to Gridrock from Second Life will show with an _EXTERNAL tag.

If you would like to have non-OGP access to any of our projects, or for more information please don’t hesitate to contact me..

whyroc@in2orbit.net

This is incredible news…really… from Linden Labs. Through a beta progam users are now able to try to connect thier standalone opensim server and hook it up to the Linden Beta test grid. This is one of the best directions I have seen SecondLife take in the the last two years I have been here. Before, I was critical how SL showed a lack of interest in the open source community, with this move I think they may have solidified thier place as the solid forerunners in VW development.

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Open_Grid_Public_Beta

(needs SL login)

Open source has had another major impact for the future of Second Life, with Domino Marama’s Blender Scripts available in the SL forums. I have been so impressed with the rapid development made by him as well as prim.blender. With the workflow proposed it is not far off that Blender could be used as a complete offline builder and texture tool. This is very exciting to me:)

What does this mean to the metaverse? It remains to see, but this announcement really kicks it up a notch in terms of gaining a market for disparate virtual world environments, it much easier to imagine customers arriving to your opensim world from SecondLife than neccesarily needing to manage identities for each of the many worlds that will emerge.

Second Life may have just cemented itself firmly in the user and asset management services throne by providing Open Grid developers, artists and operators the important and needed channels for authentication and commerce, as well as an exisiting market of motivated users.
Here is my OpenSim, now running standalone, with MySql and mono 2.0. I have scaled down to a server with 1gig of ram for $25 us/mo.

I am working through the details of converting my own opensim, watch for more info:)

as always roc on!

Hello again.

Today I am going to attempt to make sense of my notes on several sheets of folded and crumpled paper that I took during the installation process.

I will not go into minute detail into each of the steps required, but hopefully give you some key words and concepts that will serve as a Linux booster shot for those who may be planning an OpenSim installation of their own. My intention is that you can find the needed documentation on the installation and configuration depending on your own system and security requirements.

So I will jump right in in terms of installation of most of the below processes, with Debian based systems ‘apt-get’ is pretty easy. Otherwise look for instructions on how to get and de-package these programs at their own websites.

1. Plan your project and order dedicated server, this depends on your budget I would suggest finding the best deal possible from a big data center. I chose a server from OVH.com if you are a France or UK resident I think you would be hard pressed to find a better deal (sorry to sound like an ad) the offer I currently have is the START 100M LARGE ++ which is total overkill for my current needs. But it is still a deal at 68EU/mo with tax. I have comfortably run 4 regions with 20 concurrent users with this set up. Remember OpenSim is modular so you can always add or scale your grid.
2. When you get your server, which may vary from hours to weeks depending on the company, you should verify some key things to avoid problems later. I chose Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon as my OS and it was installed when the server was put online. Great! Yes? .. no the default root partition was only 3 gigs.. I reinstalled the OS through the web interface provided by OVH and partitioned my 750 Gig drive, giving almost half to the root partition (this is not the same as the root user.. this is the directory structure ‘/’ under which all the program files are stored) I would suggest a minimum of 20 gigs for the root partition.
3. Login to your new server- use the SSH program ‘putty’ using the root user with the password that should have been sent when you rented the server. Create a user for OpenSim and others if needed.
4. Edit the sources file, this is where Linux knows to look for updates and new programs. This file is in /etc/apt/sources.list. You will need to copy a good sources file from the Internet or uncomment sources as needed.
5. LAMP: install the standard applications (apache, mysql, php) you may as well do this, even if the only thing OpenSim really needs for this installation is mysql.
6. Install Webmin: this is a program that allows you to administer the server from your browser
7. Install Proftpd: this will allow you to upload jp2 and terrain files for the sim
8. Install Subversion: this is how you will get the releases of opensim loaded onto your server (svn co ….)
9. Install mono: this is the software that allows us to run c# applications on linux
10. Install nant: a build complier
11. Download OpenSim according to instructions on the wiki, configuring OpenSim.ini for Mysql
12. Create SQL user for opensim, and create a database called ‘opensim’ using Webmin (*optional create an avatar appearance db and table with this SQL )
13. On your local machine use L3DT to create terrain files, upload via ftp

Thats it! I said I wasn’t going to go into detail. Of course there is much more that you will need to find out about but hopefully this will give you a road map and some insight into what is involved.

Hopefully someone can use this.. works for me!

based on: http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Using_screen

I’m using MySql and a local grid setup. To use this script:

copy this text and paste it into a new file on your server with a .sh extension, ie ’sess.sh’

enter ‘./sess.sh’ at the command line once to start all the servers, it may take a minute to return to the command line

enter ‘./sess.sh’ again (or hit the up arrow key) to either attach to one of the servers or to close all servers

to attach to a server, enter its number or name

to close all servers hit any other key

#!/bin/bash

# filters the screen -ls output to show the sesssions
sessions=`screen -ls | sed -ne 's/[[:space:]]//' -ne 's/((Attached)|(Detached))// p'`
res=`echo "$sessions" | wc -w`

if [[ "$res" == "0" ]]
then
echo "  No servers detected starting Grid..."

cd /usr/local/opensim2/bin
sleep 5
screen -S user -d -m  mono OpenSim.Grid.UserServer.exe
sleep 5
screen -S grid  -d -m mono OpenSim.Grid.GridServer.exe
sleep 5
screen -S asset  -d -m mono OpenSim.Grid.AssetServer.exe
sleep 5
screen -S inv  -d -m mono OpenSim.Grid.InventoryServer.exe
sleep 5
screen -S sim  -d -m mono OpenSim.exe

exit
fi

echo ''
echo "  CURRENT SESSIONS  - enter session number to connect, any other key will stop servers"
echo "  ------------------------"
#screen -ls | sed -ne 's/[[:space:]]//' -ne 's/((Attached)|(Detached))// p' | cat -n
echo "$sessions" | cat -n
echo "  ------------------------"
echo ''

#if first argument is not specified, script will ask for number of screen

if [ -z $1 ]
then
echo -n "  Reattach to session: "
read session
else
session=$1
fi

#attach to specified session
linenum=0
name=`screen -ls | sed -ne 's/[[:space:]]//' -ne 's/((Attached)|(Detached))// p' |
while read line
do
let "linenum += 1"
if [[ "$linenum" -eq "$session" ]]
then
echo $line
break
fi
done`

if [[ "$name" != "" ]]
then
screen -d -r "$name"
else
echo "  Could not reattach to '$session' shutting down"

screen -S sim -r -m  -X quit
screen -S inv -r -m  -X quit
screen -S asset -r -m  -X quit
screen -S grid -r -m  -X quit
screen -S user -r -m  -X quit

fi