I've been trying for about 3 weeks to get SETI/BOINC to work on my 1.25GHz PowerBook G4 running OS X 10.3.4. It is one of the standard configurations, 15" monitor, 74.5 GB Hard drive. On my machine 26GB is free.

I've been unsuccessful with BOINC 3.1.18, 3.1.19 and 3.1.20. I always get a message telling me workunits are available but I don't have enough disk space. I've kept cranking down the work space requriements and now have the settings at use no more than 3GB, Use no more than 5% of the total disk space, Leave at least 1GB, Keep .1 to .3 days work on the machine.

Has anyone else successfully downloaded work units on a PowerBook with an 80GB hard drive? If so, what were your settings that worked?


Here is the latest terminal listing:

2004-07-19 09:34:51 [---] Starting BOINC client version 3.20 for powerpc-apple-darwin
2004-07-19 09:34:51 [SETI@home] Project prefs: using your defaults
2004-07-19 09:34:51 [SETI@home] Host ID is 65583
2004-07-19 09:34:51 [---] General prefs: from SETI@home (last modified 2004-07-13 23:32:31)
2004-07-19 09:34:51 [---] General prefs: using your defaults
2004-07-19 09:34:51 [---] Fewer active results than CPUs; requesting more work
2004-07-19 09:34:51 [SETI@home] Requesting 19698 seconds of work
2004-07-19 09:36:30 [SETI@home] Sending request to scheduler: http://setiboincdata.ssl.berkeley.edu/sah_cgi/cgi
2004-07-19 09:36:42 [SETI@home] Scheduler RPC to http://setiboincdata.ssl.berkeley.edu/sah_cgi/cgi succeeded
2004-07-19 09:36:42 [SETI@home] Message from server: No work available (there was work but you don't have enough disk space allocated)
2004-07-19 09:36:42 [SETI@home] Message from server: No work available (there was work but you don't have enough disk space allocated)
2004-07-19 09:36:42 [---] General prefs: from SETI@home (last modified 2004-07-13 23:32:31)
2004-07-19 09:36:42 [---] General prefs: using separate prefs for home
2004-07-19 09:36:42 [SETI@home] Project prefs: no separate prefs for home; using your defaults
2004-07-19 09:36:42 [SETI@home] No work from project
2004-07-19 09:36:42 [SETI@home] No work from project
2004-07-19 09:36:42 [SETI@home] Deferring communication with project for 1 hours, 0 minutes, and 0 seconds

Paul,

From your terminal listing, it appears you have 2 problems:

1. You should use the default settings to reduce the problems you are experiencing. Even if you do not have enough resources (eg 20GB free HD space). I think the settings tell seti/boinc that your mac is ready to do work.

If you need help with the default settings, send me a message.

2. On 2004-07-19, seti/boinc ran out of workunits to send to users (as per the news update page/front page of seti/boinc). Leave the terminal window running in order for your mac to get a workunit as soon as the server is back up and the time out feature runs it course (this appears to be a new feature that the user cannot overide to prevent users swamping the server with workunit requests at the same time, this timer feature spaces out requests on the seti/boinc server).

I use a powerbook G4, Mac OS 10.3.4


Robert

Thanks, Robert,

I have found a combination that finally works after many experiments:

.1-3.0 days
Use no more than 60GB of disk space
Use no more than 80% total disk space
Leave 0.1 GB disk space

So work units are finally flowing both directions, though credits have not appeared in my account statistics yet. Maybe that takes some time, too.

Paul