I'd like to enlist the Linux crew to help me test something new for BOINC: an RPM package to install the client software, automatically run as a Unix 'daemon', and controllable via the BOINC Manager.

If you are familiar with RPM then you should be able to install the package easily, though if you already have BOINC installed then you may want to make adjustments first. This is documented (for now) at http://pirates.spy-hill.net/help/linux-rpm.html and the pages it links to. If you are not familiar with RPM then it should still be fairly easy to install this package on systems which use RPM.

I'd really appreciate it if some of this crew would try it out, and also look over the documentation pages. Please consider the documentation from the point of view of both an experienced Unix user and as a novice. The package also installs Unix man pages, s o comments on them are also solicited.

I want to be sure to thank Kathryn Marks for alpha testing this before I announced it for further testing. And I want to thank her for creating the logrotate configuration file.

Questions, comments, and criticisms all welcomed.
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-- Eric Myers

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats

A question Captain: on page http://pirates.spy-hill.net/help/linux-mvdir.html

the last item:

5) Test it by starting the core client. For example:

/etc/init.d/start

Shouldn't that be "/etc/init.d/boinc start"?

I just read the man pages. I had forgotten all about them.

The manager one is missing a description of the simple GUI. I believe when I did a clean install of the rpm, it started up in the simple view.
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Kathryn :o)
The BOINC FAQ Service
The Unofficial BOINC Wiki
The Trac System

the last item:

5) Test it by starting the core client. For example:

/etc/init.d/start

Shouldn't that be "/etc/init.d/boinc start"?

The manager one is missing a description of the simple GUI. I believe when I did a clean install of the rpm, it started up in the simple view.

I made a discovery last night.

I accidentally double clicked the rpm on my desktop. And lo and behold, it started the install process. I had no idea you could do that.

Basically, you double click. It brings up a box for the root password. Once you enter that, the package manager resolves any dependencies and then installs.


The only thing it doesn't seem to do is check the signature.


This was done on Fedora 7 with KDE. If any Gnome folks can try this, it would be much appreciated.
____________
Kathryn :o)
The BOINC FAQ Service
The Unofficial BOINC Wiki
The Trac System

KSMarksPsych wrote:

The manager one is missing a description of the simple GUI. I believe when I did a clean install of the rpm, it started up in the simple view.

Good point. Is there existing documentation of the simple GUI I can use, or do we have to write something from scratch.

Hope this helps someone.

Yep. That worked (version 5.10.21-18).

Had me going for a bit until I found you'd shifted the executables to /usr/bin from usr/local/bin.

It even survived a reboot - despite saying that starting the daemon had failed. When I checked, I found it hadn't failed, and boincmgr started and connected just fine.

For ease of use I've added boincmgr to the SuSE menu giving it /usr/bin/boincmgr as the command and /var/lib/boinc as the "Work path". This works OK, too.

Don't hesitate to ask if you want me to try out anything else for you.

Is that something any SUSE user would know about, or should it be documented somewhere?

It's not superuser standard, but if we're serious about catering for naive users then I guess we should document. In fact I'd be happy to write all of this up for you (with pictures).

It's not immediately clear to me how I'd do either of those things. I can see mailing lists and the like, but no wikis. Maybe this web 2.0 thing's too complicated for me in my old age.

But if you can explain it to me (as to a child), then I'll be more than happy to oblige.

It even survived a reboot - despite saying that starting the daemon had failed. When I checked, I found it hadn't failed, and boincmgr started and connected just fine.

Wormholio wrote:

Let me know if that continues. If so, we can try to debug it.

For ease of use I've added boincmgr to the SuSE menu giving it /usr/bin/boincmgr as the command and /var/lib/boinc as the "Work path". This works OK, too.

KSMarksPsych wrote:

Oh cool. I just figured out how to do this in Fedora/KDE. I didn't even know you could add stuff to the K Menu.

Do you agree it would be a good idea to document it, and would it still be a good idea for me to do that? Or would you prefer to do it yourself? I'm happy either way.

Cheers


Peter

Peter, email me through my helpers page.

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/help_vol.php?volid=7
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Kathryn :o)
The BOINC FAQ Service
The Unofficial BOINC Wiki
The Trac System

Nice job Peter!

I took the .ico from my Vista install (the host triple boots), opened it in KolourPaint and saved it as a .pgn. So I have the smaller logo, the one like the BOINC favicon. I'll throw it up on the Wiki page once it gets created.

Since you took the time to create the content, I'll turn it into a Wiki page. I can't promise it'll get done today.

Can you put the images up on your website so I can get at them?

I'll put your content up as is and then put some stuff to discuss on the talk page.

Again, thanks for your help. I actually learned something new from your walkthough. I knew about the database for locate only updating once a day (asked Eric about it a few days ago) but I didn't know you could update the db manually (should have asked about that).

I love the Linux community :-)
____________
Kathryn :o)
The BOINC FAQ Service
The Unofficial BOINC Wiki
The Trac System

Thanks Peter.

I left you a comment :-) Isn't mplayer a great thing??

I got the images. I'll pull the new pdf too.

As expected I didn't get around to putting the content in the Wiki yet. I'll work on it this week. It'll take me a while because I'm not all that familiar with MediaWiki markup. The bulk of the Wiki type editing I've done is on Trac. But I should be able to pick it up fairly quickly.
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Kathryn :o)
The BOINC FAQ Service
The Unofficial BOINC Wiki
The Trac System

I think some people shy away from wikis thinking that they are complicated, but that's not the case. (In fact the name comes from the Hawaiian "wiki-wiki", which means quickly -- you should be able to learn to edit a wiki quickly.)

So here are just a few short ideas I want to get across:

* It's easy. Just edit. Blank lines start a new paragraph.

(Okay, watch out for lines which start with a blank. They will be indented as example code or commands. That's good if that's what you intended, annoying if not.)

* wiki markup codes can be used for formatting, but you don't need to know wiki markup to enter content text. The wiki markup is supposed to be easier than HTML formatting, but I don't know if that's always the case. You can also use HTML for formatting (just not for links), so if you already know HTML then use that.

(So if you already know enough to write a blog, you can edit wiki pages.)

* wiki pages are intended to be collaborative. People who know stuff (Peter, Kathryn) can write what they know, and people who know more wiki markup can improve the formatting. Anybody can fix typos, or improve phrasing or grammar, or anything else. Everybody can help make the documentation better.

____________
-- Eric Myers

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats

Would have helped if I had told everyone that I have the text of the page up.

Adding BOINC Manager to the K Menu

The images need to be added in and the whole thing needs to be formatted.


____________
Kathryn :o)
The BOINC FAQ Service
The Unofficial BOINC Wiki
The Trac System

I finally had some time to try this on my fedora 7 system. 5.10.29-1 errored and would not install due to not being able to find libc.so.6. I was able to find this file on my system, but not in the add/remove software app.

The 5.10.21-18 version installed with a warning but worked fine.

The gnome menu commands were a bit different for adding the manager but the instructions posted were enough to point me in the right direction to set it up.
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BOINC WIKI

Dirty John Rackham

I finally had some time to try this on my fedora 7 system. 5.10.29-1 errored and would not install due to not being able to find libc.so.6.

The 5.10.21-18 version installed with a warning but worked fine.

The Gnome menu commands were a bit different for adding the manager but the instructions posted were enough to point me in the right direction to set it up.

Hmm.
I thought I'd give you a hand and do some editing whilst on my lunch hour, but I was refused permission. It said I needed to confirm my email, but I'd done that yesterday I thought; and I am logged in ...

Just my humble opinion, but I would nearly always argue for separating things that are even slightly different. Slight differences to experienced users can look like unsurmountable differences to a naive user.

When there are two pages up, someone could look at them and decide whether it would be possible to extract any common sections into a common page that would point to the two specific pages.

However, since this is such a small thing I think this may be the time to let it drop, with a recommendation to change sleep 1 to (say) sleep 10.

I've logged in and logged out and closed and re-opened the browser on two different machines now, using two different operating systems (same browser - FF), but still no joy, I'm afraid. I still get the message that I have to confirm my email addy.

To give you an idea of what I mean I've knocked up a quick few starter pages (content shamelessly lifted from the Wiki and BOINC Web site). You can find them at:
BOINC v5 Help (example)

The gnome and KDE setup is different enough for separate pages. It may be possible to combine parts of it, probably using templates for the common parts would be the best way.

It was called a warning by fedora, but it was a daemon starting message. I guess the package was not expecting a response.
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BOINC WIKI

Dirty John Rackham

I can't post over there because it says I don't have an account. I'll try to create one.

... later

Nope. Couldn't see any way to create an account. Trying to Subscribe just gave me the same message (No account).

On your point about it looking like Windows help - it is Windows help actually. It's a .chm file converted to HTML. It's a bit basic in the sense that there's very little choice in the way of skin for the frameset. The way the content looks is entirely up to the author (via stylesheets in the normal way).