Tutorial: Spinning up Opensim on Windows Vista (part 1)

If you’ve have ever wanted your own Second Life Island/Estate but didn’t want to pay the $1700 bucks plus $300/month fees for it, then this tutorial series is for you.  I will take you through downloading, installing, and configuring an Opensim standalone server on Windows Vista using the community edition of MySQL. It is all free of charge thanks to many others who are forging a freely available virtual world platform.

If you are not a developer, no worries, we will not be building any source code, downloading any version of Visual Studio, or learning how to use subversion. You will have to edit a few config files though and create a database so roll-up your sleves and prepare to get a little dirty.  

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly and easily it was to get a Sim up and running.  I’d estimate this process will take you a few hours.

If you are unfamiliar with Opensim project, then now is a good time to get acquainted with it.  Opensim is basically an open source virtual world platform that acts and behaves very much like Second Life.  The approach being used it basically to reverse engineer the Second Life backend given knowledge gained by Linden Lab open sourcing the Second Life viewer and the work done by a group called libSecondLife. 

An Opensim server is not connected to the Second LIfe grid, but there are various Opensim grids already coming into existence (some of these I’ll explore later).   You will not be able to export your Second Life objects/avatars and import them into your new sim, but you can re-build your objects and reuse your LSL scripts.  There are many limitations relative to SL like no currency/economy structure, however, for a cost free ability to experiment with a SL island/estate there is no better alternative.

This post will be updated with all the tutorials as I complete them:

• Part 2 - Downloading all the pre-requisites
• Part 3 - Installing and Configuring MySQL
• Part 4 - Installing and Configuring OpenSim
• Part 5 - Spinning Up and Testing the Opensim Server

When you are done you will have a whole sim to yourself along with your crispy new avatar, you’d better get building.

Please let me know if you encounter anything that is confusing, any new gottchas I should point out, or any inaccuracies and I will make updates.