G\'day:

Missed out on the Alpha as Life intruding, now trying the Beta. Is there any instructions for installation on Linux? I am running Rehat Fedora Core 2. I have some familiarity with Linux over the past few years but still have some stupid questions.

I\'ve noticed in one message not to install as root, and under /home. Will it install as a service/Dameon so that it won\'t matter if I am logged in as that particular user?

Any other issues I should know about? Did I miss a web link?

DaveN

Hi, Dave,

No problem, actually. (I prefer to work in KDE as much as I can -- because it saves a lot of typing. [I use SusE, so there may be some strangeness between the two Linux flavors, thine and mine.])

I've read that it is a very bad idea to run any application as 'root' because it gives a cracker unlimited access to your machine. As to daemon, I can't help there. (I haven't looked into that because I'm the only user on my machines and am always logged-on).

Create a Directory in your account with whatever name appeals to you.
Download the BOINC Core Client 4.02 and copy it to your Directory.
Click the icon and then click "Action" in the pop-up window.
"Extract all", after which it asks where to? (I navigate to the same directory.) Then click OK.
An 'exe' will appear. (A 'gear' in SuSE; I don't know about Red Hat.)
Right click the exe icon, click 'Properties' and 'Permissions' and click all three "user" boxes.
Check your BOINC account Preferences and set up for General and Home (or work or schoool), else the thing may choke on one of several bones when you try to install.
Open a KDE Konsole (click the screen icon in system tray in SuSE) and 'cd' to your new Directory.
'ls' to be sure you are where you want to be and then copy/paste the exe name to the c/l (following './' , e.g., mypath:~> ./boinc_4.02_i686-pc-linux-gnu
Hit 'enter', then give the project URL from your registration email; hit 'enter', and then your account code from the same email.
Hit 'enter' and you are off to the races. (It takes a few minutes to get set up. [Be prepared for a LOT of stuff to scroll up the screen! BTW, you can drag the edge of the Konsole window to make it wide enough to eliminate line-wrap for most lines.])

(Hope I didn't miss a step!)

If you want to do it the old-fashioned way (the hard way, IMO) the instructions are in the invitation email Carl sent to you.

Best of luck.

________________________________________________
Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
-- Paulo Freire (1921-1997), educator, author.

Here are few brief notes to get you going. Sorry, you're going to have to do a little man page reading...

Don't run as root. There is no need to. If you are running as root then you don't know what you're doing and you're bound to make extra work for yourself (:-))

Root is there to let you play god for 'system' tweaks only.


To have boinc as an always running background process, you're going to have to discover the command line (terminal) interface...

When you have set up boinc as you want and attached, stop it. Then one way (of many) is to run it redirecting all output to a log file:

(cd into the directory you have for boinc)
$ ./boinc_4.02_i686-pc-linux-gnu >boinc.log 2>&1 &

This runs as a 'background job'. You can see it running with "top" or "ps".

To keep it running even when you log out, then you need to 'disown' it:

Type:
$ jobs
to get its job number. Then:
$ disown job_number

To continuously see the log output, use:

$ tail -f boinc.log
Use ctl-c to kill tail and get your command prompt back.

To see the man pages for any command, use:
$ man tail
for example, or in KDE's konqueror on the address line:
#tail


I've got something similar to that lot scripted to make it automatic. If you're really interested, you can make it into a 'service'.

Good luck,
Martin

Thanks Astro & Martin.

The commands helped, getting back to Linux after a few years is a lot of remembering and reading to do. I'd wanted to see if there would be differences in how things were started up depending on how I'd installed the app and ran it. Now I realize it doens't really matter.

Things are up and running couple more questions that I you 2 have aluded to but haven't gone to far with.

If I create a bash script to start the boinc client are there any environment variables to set ahead of time or would they have be on the command line?

Martin: Could the obtaining of the job number and disowning be done from the starting script? and Yes I am reading up on scripting and such.

Thanks again.
Dave

Edit: Ooops clicked the wrong thing to reply. :(

Hi,

I don't use a start-up script but verstapp (in Australia) does. I suspect he'll weigh-in when morning arrives in Oz.

Cheers.
________________________________________________
We have met the enemy and he is us -- Pogo