iliveisl

 

OpenSim for free! on a stick

13 comments

usbisland_006

4 sims on a USB drive - looks like :|

oh yay, i can learn! thanks to Roger Stack’s video tutorials, i was able to install OpenSim on a USB drive

i had thought that setting this up would have been incredible technical, what with databases and all. subQuark had asked our previous OpenSim providers about doing this exact thing for workshops he was doing. since they never did it, i thought “holy cow, if they can’t do it, it must be impossible!”

but one night i thought i’d look into it again and thankfully came across Roger Stack’s instructions. they seemed very possible and pretty automated, but i messed up somewhere and failed. Roger saw this and created videos. this is the third post i do on this, and like a baseball game, rather than strike out, i hit a home run! (so Roger is now a winning baseball coach?) =D

and it only takes a small USB stick, i used an 8 gig Sony because it was laying around and i had no idea how much space i would need. well, after all is said and done, it’s less that 250 megs! of course, as you build it will use up space, but you don’t need a big stick for this (maybe 2 gigs? so for less than $10 you should be golden)

why do this? well, if you are thinking of doing OpenSim but not sure, this is about as cheap as you can go. this would be a good way for educators, municipal, and corporate users to try it out

if Ener can install it, so can you!

this installation sets up a four sim grid and took me about 20 minutes to do. i was following Roger’s video tutorial to the letter and one process took about 5 minutes to run on its own (i went and did some laundry while waiting) =D

if you are an educator being booted from Second Life, this may be a great way to do a proof-of-concept to help your school and its IT department see that OpenSim is worth installing on the school’s servers. it also may be a great option to save your builds while you are trying to figure out what to do

this is also a great way for corporate eLearners to do what subQuark talked about last year for no cost at all and without worrying about corporate firewalls or connectivity!

the only thing i varied from with Roger’s instructions was the command prompt for Windows XP, i used this info for that part

in the video below, i doubled the playback speed so you did not have to sit through as much and wanted to show the 4 new regions and how fast an OAR file loads (double the time since this is double speed). it works very well and is not laggy at all

thanks Roger for making “Ener-proof” instructions! =D

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written by Ener Hax

September 26th, 2010 at 7:10 pm

posted in OpenSim,virtual worlds

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13 comments to 'OpenSim for free! on a stick'

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  1. nice video ener – and great oar file to use as a demo! i’ve put the video on the wiki. http://vw-standards.wikispaces.com/Research+-+Transferability

    i’m thinking of giving teachers a tropical island to take home at my next workshop – cocktails included :-)

    thanks for the comments

    Roger Stack

    26 Sep 10 at 7:41 pm

  2. cool! well your teaching ability shines through into the real world. following your instructions allowed me to do something that is actually quite technical and precise. i meant to mention installing Imprudence on the stick to be fully self-contained! i’d be glad to give you a strawberry colada i made in a coconut shell! complete with flexi straw and tiny drink umbrella!

    clever on giving an OAR. that is the biggest concern i hear from teachers – the lack of any structure. for many people, that canvas is too blank and it is overwhelming to think of building all of the things you want. i should package my little stage as an XML for people to use. i used to give it away free inSL . . .

    thanks Roger and great narration voice you have!

    Ener Hax

    26 Sep 10 at 9:26 pm

  3. You’ve got a whole world… in your hand. ;p

    DreamWalker McCallister

    27 Sep 10 at 3:16 am

  4. Well done on getting this working Ener, do you know which section you were missing out?

    Jonathan

    27 Sep 10 at 3:38 am

  5. lol, no i am not sure! i followed Roger’s instructions to start and something was not right right before running configure .exe. when i first did it, that would run but only for about 10 seconds. this time i followed his video and paused at each step. this time configure.exe took about 6 or 7 minutes to complete

    i started fully fresh by reformatting my stick and the only deviation was making my master avatar me and not Poly Tech. everything else i kept the exact same

    good luck, and if you get it going let me know

    i wonder if once a stick is setup if it can just be directly copied to other sticks? that would be a neat trick =)

    Ener Hax

    27 Sep 10 at 8:36 am

  6. [...] instructions and video tutorials about the process.  After watching the tutorials and reading a blog post by the wonderful Ener Hax regarding her experience with the setup process, I decided I was up to [...]

  7. Can it be done on a Mac?

    Grid Jumper

    27 Sep 10 at 8:58 pm

  8. great question, i am asking on twitter and will let you know (me –> @iliveisl on twitter) =)

    Ener Hax

    27 Sep 10 at 10:54 pm

  9. [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Judy O'Connell, Botgirl Questi, Liz Dorland=Chimera, Nat, Maria Korolov and others. Maria Korolov said: RT @iliveisl OpenSim for free! on a stick http://bit.ly/9tfGpk [...]

  10. [...] quick Googling brought me to Ener Hax’s wonderful blog, and a detailed explanation of her own experiences setting up and running OpenSim on a USB key.  I also found a blog post by Peter Miller (the [...]

  11. I want to run OpenSimulator on my Mac OS X 10.6.4.
    I was unable to find OpenSimulator-0.7.0.2 for Mac.
    I downloaded and installed MonoFramework-2.8_10.macos10.novell.x86.
    I downloaded OpenSimulator-0.6.8, but was unable to install it with this error message “Mono CSDK not found.”
    I think the MonoFramework is CSDK.
    What am I doing wrong?

    Stone Semyorka

    10 Oct 10 at 9:41 am

  12. whoa, i have zero Mac experience =( but did see instructions for Mac 10.5 with a caveat that says it *might* run on 10.6

    http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Build_Instructions

    10 years ago when i started in with flash i had a PC and wanted an Apple laptop. i figured it would be good for me to know both systems. i never got the Apple because i could not afford two versions of Macromedia (lol, that goes back eh?)

    i never went down the Apple path and i feel like i short changed myself

    apart from that link, i’d suggest the OpenSim forum. there are people that have 10.6 and have OpenSim running. i imagine that some of those people would be helpful if asked

    http://osgrid.org/forums/search.php?keywords=mac+10.6&terms=all&author=&sc=1&sf=all&sk=t&sd=d&sr=posts&st=0&ch=300&t=0&submit=Search

    good luck and sorry i was of little help =(

    Ener Hax

    10 Oct 10 at 10:01 am

  13. [...] OpenSim for free! on a stick - september 26th sim-on-a-stick video showing an OAR being loaded [...]

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