Gobi Greenwood is my friend from the central grid. Central Grid is an alternative to Linden Labs. There are plenty of others, but Central Grid has been growing and getting some attention as a place to lure outcasts.

I have a bit of land over there and have a log cabin setup. I've been having problems keeping images in my inventory after uploading them, as well as the ability to compile scripts. Gobi gave me the heads up that scripts are working now. I'll probably head on over to check it out sometime. I still want to try out the new mono client on the second life beta grid. Too much is happening at once.

Gobi went on further to point out a simple way to start creating your own sim in no time at all. He pointed me to a link for The Guide To Hitchhiking in your Simulator. It appears that this is a live bootable cd that you just pop in your computer and reboot your OS. You are automatically running a linux distributable with OpenSIM.

This sounds really promising. Really! My main goal here for demonstrating second life is the inability to get past corporate firewalls. To get around this, I can go through a lot of steps to install and configure OpenSIM. I just don't like the complexity of going through all the steps.

I'm downloading an ISO image rite now. Hopefully it can work with virtual pc just fine. Everything is lost when you turn off the box, or reboot back into windows. With virtual PC, I can just save the current state of the operating system and continue later.

I did a search for the D-GiG linux distribution which the ISO that I'm downloading and found a location in SL called LiteSIM. The website simply states:

Watch this space

Our backend systems are currently being updated ready to launch. When complete you will be able to register for an account and create your own hosted virtual land region within minutes via this website.

Currently, these places feel like a lot of grass roots campaigns just starting out. I understand that different grids are using OpenSIM to provide a service similar to Linden Labs with Second Life. My hope is that one of them will totally flip the whole idea of what a virtual world is and introduce something new and different that Linden Lab never saw comming. Perhaps something like letting people control gravity in their own sims, or letting there be NPC's designed as objects with avatar bodies or something.