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Since one of my personal favorite viewers is Henri Beauchamp’s excellent Cool Viewer, I thought I might give a short how-to on installing it on Linux, as it sometimes seems to cause some confusion.

You will need to download the Second Life Viewer and the current release of the Cool Viewer diff files.

Zip Files in directory

My recommendation is to create a directory to hold your Cool Viewer as the diff files are updated frequently. Since I test out multiple viewers, I call mine “Viewer bases”and make a separate Cool Viewer directory inside, but feel free to organize yours any way you like.

The viewer and the diff files are both normally in the first Linux section on the official Cool Viewer website. I strongly suggest you only download these from there for security and in order to be sure you have the most current files. It is very likely the version numbers on the diff files you download and those in my screen shots will be different.

Now that you have both of those, we need to extract them and get the files copied over correctly.  As I want to make this is painless as possible for new Linux users, I will be using a file manager.

In my case, I am using Nautilus in Ubuntu 10.04. Your file manager may vary by the desktop and Linux distro you are using so a few of the menu options I reference may be slightly different.

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Here we go!

1. Right click on the Second Life viewer .zip file. In the pop-up menu select “Extract Here”. This can take a few seconds so be patient.
2. Once that is done, right click on the Cool Viewer diff .zip file and extract that the same way.
   

   Extract the .zip files

3. There are a couple of options now. If your file manager supports it, you can open an extra pane (pressF3 in Nautilus) and then open the newly created diff file directory in one of the panes. Otherwise, just open the diff file directory in the current window.
4. Select everything in the diff directory. You can use the menu (Edit -> Select All) or keyboard (Ctrl+A).
   

   Select everything in the diff directory

5. Now we need to copy these files. You can use the menu (Edit -> Copy) or keyboard (Ctrl +C).
6. Once everything is copied, move back up a level and open the Second Life viewer directory.
7. We now need to paste those copied files. You can either use the menu (Edit -> Paste) or keyboard (Ctrl +V).
8. In Nautilus, you get a pop-up telling you that certain directories already exist. In this case, you select the “Merge All” button on the pop-up. If you just select “Merge”, hightlighted by default as shown below, you will have to keep hitting the button until all the directories are done.
   

   Folders already exist, so Merge All

9. Once the Merge completes, you should again get a pop up telling you about files which already exist. In this case, we select “Replace All”.
10. Once that completes, you are done. The installation is completed.

Updating your Cool Viewer is as simple as getting the new diff files, extracting and copying just like we did above. It is generally a good idea to also check the version number on the official viewer, just in case it changes.

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In order to start your new Cool Viewer, you have several options.

1. You can double click on the “snowglobe” executable file and choose your options or
2. You can open a teminal in the appropriate directory and type “./snowglobe” to run it, or
3. You can create a desktop launcher.

Any of the above will work to run your awsome new Cool Viewer so you can sit back and enjoy all the Cool goodness.

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