[Update May 11th 2010: After recent leaks about data mining and exploits directly related to Emerald developers, I can no longer recommend this viewer for any reason whatsoever. This document here remains for historic purposes.]

There are several viewers¹ which provide an already built-in solution to access other grids than Second Life. Technically, though, it’s possible to use about any viewer that can access SL for opensim grids as well (except when the grid operators have restricted access to their own viewer or when the grid supports a different rendering technology). According to the login instructions on the OSGrid site, the changes that need to be made are the loginuri, helperuri and loginscreen. (Imho helperuri and loginscreen can be left out, but the loginuri manages which grid to connect to. [UPDATE: helperuri is neccessary for some features, such as parcel transfers and buying, even for 0L$]) These instructions work on the regular SL client as well as on the popular Emerald Viewer. However, being a Mac user, the login instructions for Max OSX are somewhat complicated, because working with the console (or rather terminal) is awkward for anyone not familiar with Unix. Fortunately, there’s an easier way.

[UPDATE: With the release of Emerald 1.23.5 Build 1585, Emerald incorporates the Meerkat grid manager, making the below instructions unneccessary.]

Right-clicking on an application icon enables you to open its package contents, and in the Contents/Resources folder of the Emerald Viewer there’s a small file named ‘arguments.txt’. All you need to do is put the additional informations the viewer needs to connect to other grids into that file (the part starting with ‘-loginuri…’). There are some things to watch out for, though. First off, every argument needs to start with a double minus instead of a single one. (Thus, -loginuri needs to be –loginuri.) And second, the settings_emeraldviewer.xml causes problems that prevent from logging into OSGrid correctly. So there are some steps that need to be taken first. Here’s what worked for me:

1. Download and install the Hippo Viewer.
2. Log into OSGrid using the Hippo Viewer once. This should create a file named ‘settings_osgrid.xml’ in Library/Application Support/Second Life/user_settings/
3. Open arguments.txt in the Emerald contents.
4. Change them to:

--channel "Emerald Viewer"  --settings settings_osgrid.xml --loginuri http://osgrid.org:8002 --loginpage http://osgrid.org/loginscreen.php  --helperuri http://osgrid.org/

Now you should log into OSGrid by default whenever Emerald is started up.

The nice thing about Emerald is the built-in IRC client, which enables you to connect to the OSGrid IRC channel, as well as making your own IRC channels, which come in handy as long as group chats are not working. To log into OSGrid’s IRC, open the communicate window, click on the IRC tab and choose ‘new’. Change the settings to:

• Settings Tag: OSGrid (optional, you can use any other name here)
• Nick: <your nick here> (You can use any nick you like, not neccessarily your account name. This means, that others in IRC could also have different names than their OSGrid / SL account names.)
• Server: chat.freenode.net 6667 (6667 in the separate input field next to the chat server)
• Channel: #osgrid
• Save

Now double-clicking on the OSGrid chat will open the irc chat window, which works mostly just like a regular IM-chat window. If you left ‘connect automatically at login’ checked in the IRC Settings, you’ll be connected to the OSGrid IRC whenver you log into OSGrid. (Or into ANY grid, at that. The nice thing about IRC is that it’s separate from a grid, so you can stay connected to the IRC channels from anywhere.)

1. Hippo, Imprudence and Meerkat [↩]