Just the other evening I was sitting at home working on our test OpenSim platform, safely away from the gaze of students, when I began to think about the likely future of the project at our college. Certainly there are departments that have expressed an interest in having their own island to experiment on, which means an expansion of the facility, which in turn could mean us having to give up the test sim for deployment. Then I began to think about people who maybe do not have the luxury of a test sim to play around and experiment on, what to do then? It was at this point that I decided to have a go at downloading OpenSim and loading it onto my Windows XP machine to run it standalone; at college its installed under Linux.
The outcome was really good. Having downloaded the latest version from OpenSim.org, I ran a DOS session, went through the install procedure and after answering a few prompts arrived at the region name # prompt. From there I loaded Meerkat, created a new profile and suddenly, I am the owner of a very small island in a very large ocean.
After this I went on a web search for some free terrain raw files, found a nice zip file of 10 that I downloaded from Tomorrow Glares Into Beyond and tried them out for size.Finally in need of a building, I logged into my SL account and using Meerkat took a backup of a small Solar Home downloaded to the desktop, and then uploaded it into my new standalone simulator.
So if you need a private place to experiment with scripting, and from recent experience I do recommend experimenting on a platform other than your live server with scripts in OpenSim, or maybe just testing out the latest release, then I can certainly recommend a desktop solution.
Comments welcome, kind regards Vega
