Hello Temujin

Thanks for your reply guess i should have realised that i went into the console(not as root) typed in "which firefox" it returned asit is supposed to"/usr/bin/firefox".

I just cant make the connection between that and boinc to get seti to work.

I certainly appreciate your patience and time

The instructions you gave me didnt seem to anything at all in fact "which browser" query returned nothing at all.

Hi David
Sorry to hear you're still having problems.

Bryn didn't mean for you to type "which browser" but rather "which whatever_browser_you_use", for example I use firefox, so I would type "which firefox" and it would give an answer of /usr/bin/firefox
Sorry if this is too simple an explanation but here goes
In whatever program you're reading this with, it probably has a Help menu item, click that and in there should be an About option, click that.
That should tell you the name of the program you're using, mine says "Mozilla Firefox", which means I'm using firefox.
Now its time to type "which firefox" or whatever it said you were using.
Try doing the above and post what it says

PS
This would be much easier if you could talk to someone realtime, so you might find the online help useful, have a look at http://boinc.berkeley.edu/help.php

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Hello Bryn thank you for your reply i am quite new to Linux but have managed to get most applications working quite easily with a combination of fumbling around and contacting the forums.Yes i suspect there has been some tweaking on Xandros part.I first installed boinc through Synaptic where it tried to set a connection each time timing out until it eventually gave up after an hour i then uninstalled it assuming i had done something incorrectly and downloaded it from the boinc site and loaded it again went to attach it to the seti project which is when i received the ENVOIRONMENT VARIABLE BROWSER ETC message which i cant seem to resolve.When i then go into Xandros networks there is seti trying to reconnect which means i cant download anything so i either have to uninstall boinc,which i would rather not do,or resolve the install issue.
T he instructions you gave me didnt seem to anything at all in fact "which browser" query returned nothing at all.The fault probably lies with me and no doubt is something simple but i have to say boinc is one of the most arcane programs i have ever used.I had the old seti installed on another machine running on XP no problems then it changed to boinc which i could never get to work correctly.
once again thanks for your help.

Thanks for your advice unfortunately i still cannot get it to work i must confess i am at a loss and will need to get a step by step instruction.I have no doubt that i am doing something wrong am fairly new to Linux and am using Xandros V4.1

Hmm... Sorry it didn't work out Ok.

Looking at the Xandros site I wonder just how much they've tweaked Linux for their distribution - they do seem pretty determined to hide lots of stuff from the user.
Someone has already posted your question on their forum - maybe you? ;) (no answer posted) - and I wonder if that might be a better place to try first.
At least if there are difficulties being caused by Xandros-specific tweaks (maybe the shell variables are set in a different file, or protected from being changed by a user for safety reasons?), that forum should be able to give better help than me for the Xandros parts.

That said, if there is anything in what I posted earlier which wasn't very clear, puzzled you or just gave unexpected results (er, apart from just not setting the variable!) then please feel free to post more questions here.

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To err is human; to moo, bovine.

Thanks for your advice unfortunately i still cannot get it to work i must confess i am at a loss and will need to get a step by step instruction.I have no doubt that i am doing something wrong am fairly new to Linux and am using Xandros V4.1

Temujin tried to do as you suggested no go i have tried just about everything i can think of to no avail would appreciate any advice you may offer

From a console, logged on as the user who would run BOINC, add the following line to your .bashrc file (normally in that user's home directory):
export BROWSER=/usr/bin/firefox

You can make sure that path is correct by first doing:
which firefox
to find it on the path and use that instead.
Obviously, substitute your browser name for firefox if required. ;)

Log out, then log in again. Doing:
echo $BROWSER
should return
/usr/bin/firefox

Note that this variable won't yet be available on any currently open shell because they will be using the environment variables as they were when that instance of the shell was started. They've been changed since then so those shells will need to be restarted too.

If you've installed BOINC as root and are changing the environment variable for your normal user logon - that won't work as expected when running BOINC.
Best solution there is to install BOINC under your normal, non-privileged user logon and modify that .bashrc, and not do any BOINC-related stuff as root.

All of the above assumes you're using 'bash' (many/most do - AFAIK doing: echo $SHELL is pretty standard and would show what's in use), and that the distro hasn't done anything "tricky" with the way that bash works.

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To err is human; to moo, bovine.

Temujin tried to do as you suggested no go i have tried just about everything i can think of to no avail would appreciate any advice you may offer

have installed BOINC using Xandros 4.1 it appearstobe working but i keep geting the following"SET THE ENVOIRONMENT VARIBLE BROWSER TO THE PATH OF YOUR WEB BROWSER THEN RESTART THE BOIC MANAGER"having trouble figuring out how to do this would appreciate any help.It hasnt installed any desktop icons yet i assume it will once complete

I used to get just the same message when I launched boincmgr from a panel button and then tried to access one of the seti links from boincmgr.
I fixed it by changing the panel button shortcut to
export BROWSER=/usr/bin/firefox;/home/boinc/boincmgr
doing this lets boincmgr know which browser to start up when needed.
You say you're not clicking an icon, so I guess you're starting boincmgr from a command line. If so, type "export BROWSER=/usr/bin/firefox" or equivelent and without the quotes, then start boincmgr.

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have installed BOINC using Xandros 4.1 it appearstobe working but i keep geting the following"SET THE ENVOIRONMENT VARIBLE BROWSER TO THE PATH OF YOUR WEB BROWSER THEN RESTART THE BOIC MANAGER"having trouble figuring out how to do this would appreciate any help.It hasnt installed any desktop icons yet i assume it will once complete