Take Wine and view realXtend on Linux
Posted by on January 6, 2009 under News, howto | 
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Linux users can run realXtend viewer by using Wine.
Introduction of Wine from the website: “Wine is a translation layer (a program loader) capable of running Windows applications on Linux and other POSIX compatible operating systems. Windows programs running in Wine act as native programs would, running without the performance or memory usage penalties of an emulator, with a similar look and feel to other applications on your desktop.”
Screenshot from OpenSim wiki that shows off rex on linux
Instructions how to use Wine and make the realXtend viewer 0.4 run on Linux can be found from OpenSim wiki. The instructions were for Linux, but Wine works also on Mac OS X. If you try that and make it work (or not) on OS X, please leave a comment on this article!
When I first read about realXtend on Wine, I was suspicious about the performance. Wine works surprisingly well, the OpenSim wiki page says that the frame rate was “about 40/50 fps on a 8600 GT“.
realXtend viewer has been Windows-only right from the start. The first goal of the realXtend team was to make a prototype, so it did not matter that it was working only on Windows. The prototype was working well enough at the time of the first release (February 2008) that the prototype development continued - and continued as Windows-only.
The realXtend team is now planning a new from-scratch, BSD licensed and cross-platform viewer (read the CTN article about the new viewer). However, as making a new viewer is a huge task, we can not expect to use the new viewer before summer 2009 - so Linux/Mac users can use Wine as an intermediate solution until that.
