Wonderland Works!

Written on June 21, 2008 by Katherine W. Prawl

Friday was a red-letter day. I attended an event in Second Life for an education group, hosted by Sun Microsystems, which was intended to introduce the group members to Project Wonderland. Especially exciting was the fact that Sun and its partners (which include NMC) are exploring the possibility of allowing avatars to navigate from the Education Grid running on Wonderland servers.

I wasn’t actually able to attend the presentations because the sim was full. In fact, while I was lurking on the border of the next sim, hoping to break in at some point, I ran into Larry Pixel of NMC, who also was locked out by the avatar cap, and as he told me, he was a presenter! Finally I did make it into the sim, said hello to Claudia Linden and then promptly crashed. By the time I got back, the presentations were over, but dozens of avatars were still standing around trying to figure out how to get to the Education Grid. There were IMs flying around, some of them in the hosted group’s chat window, with instructions as they were developing, and between those and the websites that we were referred to, and later messages posted to the group’s mailing list, I eventually managed to get my avatar authorized to access the grid, downloaded the necessary software, and finally logged in.

Part of my problem was that I had an out of date installation of the Java SDK on my Mac, so I had to update that, but then it still didn’t seem to work, probably because I’m using MacOS X 10.5 “Leopard” which Sun isn’t supporting yet. So, I tried running Wonderland in WindowsXP/Home in a Parallels virtual machine. Finally, it worked! I was able to move around in a few rooms in the now-familiar Wonderland server. Sadly, at that point my Mac crashed with a kernel panic, and I had to do a cold boot (probably because I was running so much stuff I ran out of RAM). But it was great while it lasted, and I’ll try it again soon.

While I was updating software, I also downloaded Sun’s OpenSolaris (open source operating system) and xVM VirtualBox (open source virtual machine software). I’ll install and report on those later.

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