Installing Second Life Viewer for Linux 64bits

By Xah Lee. Date:

if you are installing Second Life view on Linux 64 bits, it may fail.

Same problem with official viewer or the Firestorm viewer for Linux. Their Linux versions are both built for 32 bits.

Here's sample error output:

◆ xah@xah-p6813w◆ 2013-06-19 14:35 ◆ ~/apps/SecondLife-i686-3.6.0.277516
◆ ./secondlife
64-bit Linux detected.
Multi-arch support detected.
Running from /home/xah/apps/SecondLife-i686-3.6.0.277516
 - Installing menu entries in /home/xah/.local/share/applications
bin/do-not-directly-run-secondlife-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libGLU.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
*** Bad shutdown ($LL_RUN_ERR). ***

You are running the Second Life Viewer on a x86_64 platform.  The
most common problems when launching the Viewer (particularly
'bin/do-not-directly-run-secondlife-bin: not found' and 'error while
loading shared libraries') may be solved by installing your Linux
distribution's 32-bit compatibility packages.
For example, on Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linuxes you might run:
$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs ia32-libs-gtk ia32-libs-kde ia32-libs-sdl
◆ xah@xah-p6813w◆ 2013-06-19 14:39 ◆ ~/apps/SecondLife-i686-3.6.0.277516
◆ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs-multiarch
[sudo] password for xah: 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 ia32-libs-multiarch:i386 : Depends: libgettextpo0:i386 but it is not going to be installed
                            Depends: librsvg2-common:i386 but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Solution: install a 64 bits alternative client. the Singularity Viewer worked for me. http://www.singularityviewer.org/