Recently I posted a blog about my installation of openSim on a standalone machine, well I was reading through some new OpenSim postings yesterday when I came across an article entitled “OpenSim on a USB”. The article described the installation of Mowers, OpenSim and Imprudence, all running from the USB drive. I confess that for some reason I seem to have run into a few difficulties with Mowers with regard to getting Apache to stay running. After trying a few of the more obvious tweeks like paths in the conf files and ensuring that port 80 was not already being used by another app, I thought why not use Xampp, which was already on my PC and simply needed to be installed across onto the USB. After that I downloaded the OpenSim binary, unzipped and went through the basic setup including a new avatar; by the way I named my new region port-able, which I thought appropriate. Finally I installed Imprudence. With all that done, and it does take a fare bit longer for a USB. I started Xampp with Apache and Mysql services; you will need this if you wish to use the Mysql rather the standard SqlLite. With Xampp running I started OpenSim. The next part was to run Imprudence, and entered in the user details for my avatar for localhost. After a short delay, there I am standing on a small island, brilliant.Given some of the difficulties that a few students had with getting access from home last year, a problem which seemed to have more to do with the availability of broadband and their local machine settings, this could be a really useful future option. While working on a standalone simulator may not have all the advantages of grid work, it does allow you to practice orientation, building and scripting, in private, which in itself has other advantages. I think my next move is going to be dropping the necessary download links onto a Moodle block along with a click-and-go set of instructions and see that works.
Bye for now please feel free to comment, regards Vega
