Are you one of those really really sick persons that after spending a day working online decides to go for a walk in Second Life? Does she, or he, is often asking to go out and have some fun? Would you like to have the best of both worlds?

A few days ago I invited Yesen... I mean, Cata Charik, to go with me and have some wild action in-world. We had a really good time. Word.

We started the night, it was night in RL anyway, in a disco with music from the eighties. We did as many ridicule dance steps from the decade as we could.

Then we decided to spend a few Lindens. Yeah, shopping time baby. First time in my life that I really enjoyed watching her choosing clothes in a store. I bought a few toys and then we went to the beach to relax.

Ah... relax is good.

Then it was time to go home and continue the party, obviously I can't publish those pics.

There you have it. Shopping, dancing and something more in a few hours thanks to Second Life.

We're thinking of new ways for enjoying our time in-world and are open to suggestions. Wanna share?

I've been in the social networking scene for some time already, I know the power of connecting with the right people and I love to be a part of the online society, gosh, I have a good life thanks to that! but I didn't realize how big all the Facebook frenzy was and the many new opportunities there are for us, web developers, until I started playing with the Facebook Platform.

A cool project in which I'm currently working involves some Drupal modules talking to Facebook and it's a great opportunity to explore new directions in the development of online projects.

As many of you may know (let's imagine you're a regular reader, if you aren't what are you waiting to grab the feed?), I'm a big fan of Second Life, so it was big news when I found a cool group of residents in Facebook, I've just joined.

I'm sure we'll see many new projects involving metaverses like Second Life and social networking platforms like Facebook sprouting online quite soon. Yeah, social networking platforms, not simply sites anymore, Facebook have changed it all.

There're plenty of opportunities for people creating online experiences and if you thought there were already too many fields in the web development arena think again, soon we'll see Facebook apps experts and Second Life experiences builders along with Drupal hackers in web teams.

Gosh!, these are really exciting times for those of us who love this stuff.

So, where do you think you're heading as a web developer? If we can call ourselves that way any longer.

Want to understand the world of Second Life? What could be better than learning from its creators, the founders of Linden Lab Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka, in a March 2006 presentation at Google TechTalks?

Wow! I'm the new proud owner of a small lot of 512m2 in Second Life.

After being a little worried because many residents mentioned how hard was getting land I got my lot thanks to the First Land program for only L$ 512, an excellent price.

To get it, I joined a group of residents looking for land and we were waiting until Linden Labs, a few minutes ago, put some land for sale.

A great number of residents wait a long time for this moment, some of them for weeks and a few months. I was lucky enough to get my land in less than two days.

I was too slow in the first lot I visited and couldn't complete the purchase. After a few minutes and many teleports I arrived to one available lot and voilá! Mento Gamba turned into "Mr. Gamba", at least that's what one guy told me before asking me if I was selling my new land, just seconds after I had bought it.

What did I learn? You have to use the search function as often as possible to find First Land and you have to know how to quickly teleport, even using coordinates and the map. You must also be precise when handling your avatar, specially in flying.

The moment you arrive to an available lot don't think, just right click and choose Buy. Unfortunately at this price you can't stop to think about your options, just buy as soon as you can.

You can find my new headquarters, Ventanazul HQ, at Marybank (251,241,53). There's a lot of work to do, I plan to build a small operations center and receive all my webmaster friends over there very soon.

See you in world!

The Second Life for Linux client has been in Alpha state for some time and I couldn't get it working with my Fedora Core 5 box, which has an ATI x700 card.

Now I've just downloaded an updated version and it worked.

After you've correctly setup 3D rendering for the ATI card you just need to download the Second Life client for Linux, I'm running version 1.13.2 (5), I found the link in the Second Life forum for the Linux client.

At first I had some problems with ALT + clicking but these threads helped me to get the problem solved.

The first thread tells how to disable using ALT + click in Gnome. I use KDE, there you find the relevant options going to Control Center > Desktop > Window Behavior > Window Actions. I changed the modifier key in the Inner Window, Titlebar & Frame to Meta (which is the Window key in my keyboard).

I also started Second Life with:

SDL_VIDEO_X11_DGAMOUSE=0 ./secondlife

After doing that I still had some issues with my camera and ALT clicking so I went full screen (View > Toggle Fullscreen or ALT + Enter) and things seem to be working fine now.

I can't teleport right now but I guess is just a temporal grid issue.

I hope this helps all linuxers out there to get into Second Life. By the way, I'm Mento Gamba, shoot me an IM while you are in-world.

Update: Bad timing! There was in fact a grid problem when I wrote this article; however, after it was resolved, I still couldn't teleport. The problem was that I was using a preview version of the Linux client which uses the Beta Grid. I grabbed a copy of the non-preview client, the one the link above refers too, and now I'm back on business.