There’s lots of non-graphical clients for Second Life out there, starting with AjaxLife and friends and ending with Metabolt and friends.
And all of them are better than nothing when you can’t use a real viewer, but none of them were, in my opinion, satisfactory for what I would want a lite viewer for – and for what, I believe, most people who actually need one would want one for.
That is, customer support, when I’m not capable or can’t be bothered to start up a real viewer.
Almost all of the existing light client offerings suffer from specific shortcomings:
- None of them saves logs. Dunno about you, but for me this is a showstopper, because I rely on logs instead of memory to know who had what kind of problems and when. Without them, I would have problems remembering who all of those people are.
- Most of them include functions patently useless for the task of support — good if you want to run a model bot, or camp, but not really good for customer support — and are getting more and more bloated and jumbled.
- Very few of them actually behave anything like an instant messager, which is what I’d like most.
Well, here’s one that does.
SLiteChat is still a work in progress, but it’s fast progress, and it fits my expected use case better than any to date. It’s a neater and cleaner job than most, as well, it runs fine in Ubuntu on my Eee PC, and is developed for all three major platforms (Windows, Mac Os X and Linux) simultaneously.
Comes with Rika Seal of Approval. 
