[Opensim-users] OpenSimulator on PowerPC Macintosh

[Jeff Kelley]

Hello list.

My name is Jeff Kelley and i'm a software engineer (control process, real
time and other ugly things). Spent two years in Second Life and LOVED the
idea of metaverse. Now going OpenSimulator. Since i'm a long-time Macintosh
user, i have some G4 and one G5 retired. So i woke up my old iMac G5 and
started playing.

There are a number of how-to on the web and some instructions on the
OpenSimulator wiki to install opensim on a Macintosh. They recommend MONO
1.2.5 and recompiling libsl. Forget them, they are outdated. MONO 1.2.5
won't compile opensim 0.6.4, and nothing over 0.6.0 will link against
libsl11550.

Since 0.6.1, OpenSimulator now uses libOpenMataverse (libomv) in place of
libsl. Libomv is a binary dll, as is libopenjpeg plus some other, and must
be recompiled. We have to take extra care when targeting a PowerPC. It is a
big-endian, and some endianism issues have been reported and fixed since.

You have of course XCode, nant, svn. This is not a clicky-clicky thing.

- Install MONO 2.2.5 http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/archive/

[Note: i've compiled wih MONO 2.4.7 but opensim will suffer ScriptEngine
crashes running 2.4.7. MANTIS #3660. Downgrading to 2.2.5 solved the
problem]

- Check out and compile OpenSim 0.6.4-release
- Check out http://opensimulator.org/svn/opensim-libs/LibOMV_2362/
  (NOT LibOMV_2568)
- Download and apply patch at http://jira.openmv.org/browse/LIBOMV-445
   This patch solves the Dropped Malformed Packet issue,
   see networking gremlin? in the archive of the list.
- Compile LIBOMV_2362
- Compile openjpeg-dotnet with Makefile.osx
- Replace the OMV+OJPEG .dll in OpenSim 0.6.4 by the ones in LIBOMV-2362

I'm now running OpenSim 0.6.4 on MONO 2.2.5 on an iMac G5 + Tiger 10.4.10.
Database is MySQL over LAN. I can login, build, script, meet friends. Soon
join OSGrid. Physics is POS (conservative choice, I don't care a lot about
physics).

Remote users have a smooth experience through my 10mbps DSL link. No lag,
no crash. Some minor bugs i will report later: members of a linkset jumping
far away, shear/taper resetting to wrong values, non fatal SQL
System.FormatException. On the Macintosh, i would recommend Sequel Pro to
browse the database in addition to the mysql shell command.

Right now, i'm cooking a site library from www.secondlife-shirts.com so my
guests have some clothes to wear. I've imported a few of my favorite builds
from Second Life and, oh well, did you know your scripts were easily
recoverable from your viewer cache?


Cheers.