Voice in secondlife

I use secondlife a lot for my work. But in a strange way: I mostly use it as a programming environment. This is because we use secondlife in our economics experiments as a ready-made 3D interface, and I write the scripts to make it do what we want, and the only way to edit those scripts is to use the secondlife client.

Anyhow, Linden Labs recently released the 2.0 version of their viewer, and they made a big deal out of the new version voice chat, which supposedly just works and requires no setup. I have seen this claim made about many voice chat, PC/phone, etc., programs, and it's never true. For Skype it might be true on Windows, but on Linux it sure still is a big mess.

This is why I am delighted to report that with Secondlife 2.0 Beta on Ubuntu GNU/Linux 9.10, running under xmonad and with pulseaudio for an audio server...

...I had no problems whatsoever. Clicked on the "speak button," said "can you guys hear me?" and the answer came back "yes."

Sometimes software does work ;-)

(BTW, apparently the way Linden Labs got this to work was by licensing something from a company called Vivox, which makes a library for voice chat in games.)