I know we've got at least one Linux user on the staff here at SLI (Hi Tateru), and I also discovered that there's a NEW Nicholaz Mac version (bleeding edge-r is now the latest) so I figured I'd post news about the various updates as they come out (obviously an intermittent process).

Whilst hunting around I found this page, which links to all of the Nicholaz versions, for windows, mac, and a variety of Linux builds. Enjoy your Nicholaz builds on whatever platform you run your SL. I'm still loving the return of all my screen real estate with that wide IM window and the occasional tall, thin friends window. The general speed increase is something I don't really notice until I'm doing something fiddly, but it is always there and nice to see.

More about the Nicholaz client on the Mac that I mentioned yesterday. I've blurred lots of stuff for privacy's sake, but you can see the old style friends window, and yes there's a friends button and Cntl-Shift-F toggles the window too. You can make your IM window long and thin. The audio button has moved out so you don't lose it behind the inventory if you have a full height inventory window.

Prims that are slow to load - that one prim in the bridge columns is ALWAYS slow to load, are still slow to load, but, and completely unexpectedly I get a roughly 15% increase in client FPS at each of several places I know well.

Installing the patch is really easy too. Get the disc image, make sure your client version is the only one in a folder, run the client, use File>Open to choose the folder. It took seconds to run, and that was all there was to it.

Thank you to Nicholaz and Barney!

With thanks to Barney Boomslang, you can now run a mac port of the Nicholaz patches for SL on the latest Release Candidate of the viewer. If that doesn't mean anything to you: Nicholaz is one of the prize winners for best Open Source people as announced at SLCC, and he's released a swathe of patches for SL, including one that gives you the old version of the IM and history windows. Sadly, until recently, this has only been for the PC community, but thanks to a lead in the Mac users group, I'm about to install it on my mac!

Thanks to the Mac group, Barney and Nicholaz for their notification and hard work!

Joshua Linden (Joshua Bell of Linden Lab) points out that a key memory leak fix didn't go ahead with this version as planned. In his own words:

In a really unfortunate "You suck, Lindens!" move, the big leak fix (updating to libcurl-7.16.2) was reverted before the release. I have no excuse. We screwed up. As penance, several of us spent the rest of the day (this was after the long deploy this morning) getting things back into shape. -- [SLDev mailing list]

This particular leak consumes around 250MB per hour on some systems. Linden Lab are hoping to release 1.17.1 as an optional viewer update hopefully early next week, along with a pile of other viewer bugfixes.

In the meantime, you may want to run the Nicholaz edition, which for me, neatly stays under 100MB of RAM the whole time I'm running it. All the caveats about third-party binaries apply here. You have to trust that it does what it says it does and nothing else, of course.