Firing up Firestorm

Remember way back when (no,not the Gnarls Barkely song) when I said "avoid any V2 based viewer" ?
Well...umm....*coughs and shuffles feet*; just ignore that original remark. Or at least let's pretend that I meant to add "until they get better at supporting OpenSim type grids"


The truth is the Firestorm viewer from the Phoenix team works remarkably well with Island Oasis, better in fact than Phoenix itself. Everything except search seems to work fine. Search doesn't work because they use the SL web based search that is totally incompatible with the search system for OpenSim.
So..how do you use Firestorm (or FS to save my fingers) with Island Oasis ?
Very good question, allow me to explain.
First of all, install Firestorm to your computer. You already did ? Oh,ok ..but if you didn't head here and grab the latest version. Windows, Linux and chocolate flavors are available. I mean Mac  flavor.


Now using the  shortcut icon on your desktop  or from your program menu,you just need to right click the shortcut and select  properties , choose the box that says Target and add at the very end of the line "-loginuri http://islandoasisgrid.biz:8002" , remember not to include the speechmarks, or you could just copy paste from here.
What this does is tell the shortcut to use the IO grid instead of the default SL one.Click ok on the shortcut then start the viewer and login. It should log you right in to IO.
After you logged in from the menu at the top of  the screen,Select Viewer-Preference (ALt+P) and in the menu that comes up click on the advanced tab. You need to check (or tick if you're British) the box that says "allow login to other grids"

the reason you're doing this is so that when you next run FS you'll have a grid option on the login screen that will allow you to select the Grid you want to log into.
Ok,log out of IO then run  FS again. This time, because you've already logged into IO once, it will have an entry in the grids list for IO ready for next time.
Awesome !
 Now,you'll see that it looks a bit different to regular V1 type viewers but don't worry,because if you want the classic look back, the Phoenix team added a special skin selectable from Preferences-Skins menu (I know right ! ?) called Vintage, that emulates the old UI almost perfectly.

So, enjoy, play and have fun in IO !