Hello Everyone!

I am in the process of doing a friend a favor by setting up a dedicated system for Seti@home and was in search of a little guidance.

I have set up a besic install of Slackware 10.1, kernel version 2.4.29. I installed only the most basic stripped down system I possibly could so no GUI at all and only basic hardware which went smoothly and is internet ready.

My questions concern the installation and setup of seti itself. I downloaded and extracted boinc version 4.19 and I noted a version 4.43 but only for X windows (no command line ver for linux). Is there a more recent or better version for running it on a command line?

Also what would be the best set of instructions to use to set it to automatically start on system boot and make efficient use of the majority of the system resources? Once again this is to be a dedicated machine and the person whome owns it, while pretty computer savy has less linux experience than me, and mine is minimal at best. I would preffer that the system start up and without even having to log in, start crunching numbers at max efficiency.

A couple of pointers as to what to expect along the way would be VERY helpful, as I said before my Linux skills are not quite up to where I would like them to be, I feel like I am learning allot but it takes me awhile to figure out what to do when things dont work the way I expect them to.

Once I figure out what the heck I am doing I will likely setup another linux box in the same fashion for my home as well.

Thanks for reading!

-Ken

v4.43 is not strictly a GUI system. It can be setup to only run CLI. Just download the installer script, chmod +x (I think is the command to make it executable). The installer will create a subdirectory from the directory in which it is ran.

for example...

if you have the installer script here:
/home/someuser

when you run the script it will create a subdirectory

/home/someuser/BOINC

once you install BOINC then you will need to connect to the prjects by using
boinc_client -attach_project

as far as the startup scripts in slackware, i can't help you. I'm still trying to stumble my way through Debian startup scripts.

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as far as the startup scripts in slackware, i can't help you. I'm still trying to stumble my way through Debian startup scripts.

There could be some negative side effects to this, but a quick and dirty way to launch a user app at boot up, or reboot, is via cron and the @reboot statement.
See here for a little more info on it.

There could be some negative side effects to this, but a quick and dirty way to launch a user app at boot up, or reboot, is via cron and the @reboot statement.

you mean like writing a short script and inserting it with the crontab command?

Also how do I go about raising boinc/seti's priority to the point that it is making maximum use of the system?

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you mean like writing a short script and inserting it with the crontab command?

Doesn't even require a script, just a single line added to the seti user's crontab....

@reboot /home/user/boinc/boinc

Of course you'll want to change the path to the boinc program to match where it's really located on your system. Edit the crontab by logging on as the user and issue the crontab -e command.

As for seti getting the maximum resources. In my experience on a couple different Linux machines the seti client (as installed, no tweaks or modifications) runs at near 100% cpu until some other process needs some room to run. It will then back down as needed to share the resources, and as soon as the other process(es) finish, seti will jump back up using as much as it can. This may not be true on all systems depending on what's running and how the system is configured, so your mileage may vary.

Doesn't even require a script, just a single line added to the seti user's crontab....

@reboot /home/user/boinc/boinc

Of course you'll want to change the path to the boinc program to match where it's really located on your system. Edit the crontab by logging on as the user and issue the crontab -e command.

Well I didn't have any luck with the @reboot command, but using the date/time switches I got the system starting boinc automatically and checking it every 10 minutes and restarting if nessesary, I actually got the script from a HOWTO wrote for an older version of seti (pre boinc) and it worked like a charm! It doesnt start for ten minutes after reboot but boinc starts and setiathome_4.02 jumps right to the top of running proccesses. and every 10 minutes sh jumps up to chacks that it is running and promptly disapears.

The link to the original HOWTO is here.

As for seti getting the maximum resources. In my experience on a couple different Linux machines the seti client (as installed, no tweaks or modifications) runs at near 100% cpu until some other process needs some room to run. It will then back down as needed to share the resources, and as soon as the other process(es) finish, seti will jump back up using as much as it can. This may not be true on all systems depending on what's running and how the system is configured, so your mileage may vary.

Sure enough I have been watching seti using the "top -n 1" command and it stays constantly on with the %CPU rock steady at 99.9... brilliant. I think my friend is going to be very happy with the results, so am I for that matter!

Thanks to all (especially scarecrow) for all the help and guidance! Ill be sure to give due credit when I deliver the machine!

-Ken

I see you have it going. For future reference, the normal place to put startup commands in Slackware is /etc/rc.d/rc.local. For instance I have the following commands there.

echo Starting Seti...
/home/seti/run_client

The run_client script changes to the boinc directory and has options that are passed to the client.

Happy crunching,
David

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David Stites
Pullman, WA USA