SL: Linden aren't the only Virtual World makers

Introducing a new category "SL:" to make finding relevant articles easier for my Second Life friends.

I have been looking at an alternative to Second Life where I can host my own virtual world just for practicing building etc with no lag or outages.
The project I found was OpenSim -
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page

Wikipedia has more on Open Simulator -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSimulator

Here is some info' on setting it up -
http://opensimuser.wordpress.com/2008/06/15/opensim-install-and-configuration-tutorial/

I'm still in the throes of getting it set up right, but meanwhile, I disovered that there is another project which ties all these private virtual world servers together in a grid -
http://osgrid.org/index.php?page=home&btn=1

A handy place for getting a quick overview of all this is - http://planet.opensim.us/
(not often you see a '.us' suffix)

Lest you think all this Second Life stuff is just a game and not a genuine virtual reality, I will mention that I got offered a full-time Real Life/Second Life job last week as a scripter (programmer) on a major project with a real company, I think I'm going for it.