Hi, new to BOINC and Seti@home. Downloaded and installed yesterday. Everything seems to be running OK.
My machine is a Dell inspiron 5567 with Linux Mint 19.2 Cinnamon.
In BOINC manager, tasks, there is a show graphics button, when I click on it nothing happens. The button seems to be active. It is not greyed out.
The graphics shown on
https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_graphics.php
are great. Is there a way to display them on my machine?
Thank you.

I'm running a different BOINC install and different apps than you are running, but I run a few machines with Linux Mint, and I don't think I have ever had the screensaver be functional on any Linux machine, and that may just be the nature of the beast with the Linux installs. The only other time I have seen the screensaver not run on any particular machine was when running through a virtual machine, but it looks like you are not doing that. I think the Linux installs may just not support the screensaver in their stock configuration.

You may be able to install the screensaver separately for Linux installs as somewhat of an add-on. Perhaps check the repositories first, then the Berkeley site, then turn to google in order to find it.

As far as I am aware the screen saver has not been included in any of the Linux apps for SETI@home.

---

Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

I did a brief test at SETI Beta with my new Linux machine. Looking at the resultant entries in client_state.xml, I see that I was sent

For CPU:
v8.04 and v8.05 with setigraphics_8.04_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu and setigraphics_8.05_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu respectively

For GPU:
v8.01 (cuda60) and v8.22 (opencl_nvidia_sah). No graphics app was included with the GPU versions

The OP says:

there is a show graphics button, when I click on it nothing happens. The button seems to be active. It is not greyed out.

That tells me that he was running a CPU application at the time, and a graphics app was present - otherwise, it would have been greyed out.

My suspicion is that there is only one actual graphics app for Linux, that the differentiated file names are for distribution purposes only, and the actual files are identical. And very old - there has been no graphics/screensaver development for years. Linux standards have probably evolved over the decades to a point where they no longer recognise the graphics standards that were common when BOINC emerged around the year 2005.

From https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/BOINC_screensaver:

On Linux:

This is a XScreenSaver compatible BOINC screensaver for Unix/X11.

To use this screensaver, please add the following to the 'programs' preference in your .xscreensaver file:

GL: boincscr -root \n\

If your BOINC directory differs from /var/lib/boinc, you can use the -boinc_dir command line argument.

When run, this screensaver connects to the BOINC client via RPC, asks for graphics providing tasks and starts a random graphics application. The window created by the graphics application is then searched for using X11 window properties, such as "WM_COMMAND". Not every graphics application seems to support this, but this method has been successfully tested with Einstein@Home and Climateprediction.net. When the graphics application window has been found, it will be embedded into the XScreenSaver-provided fullscreen-window, the root window, the preview window or a newly created window, depending on the environment, using the XEMBED method.

NOTE: BOINC runs even if you don't use the screensaver.

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Thank you to all who replied!
Installed xscreensaver, the preinstalled screen savers work fine. Installed BOINC screensaver from
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/BOINC_screensaver
Added GL: boincscr -root \n\ to the .xscreensaver file.
When selecting boincscr from xscreensaver at first I got a black screen 'screensaver loading' message' and 'error while loading shared libraries: libglut.so.3: cannot open shared project file: no such file or directory.
Installed freeglut3, that got rid of the error message. Now all I get is a black screen with 'screensaver loading'. No matter how long I wait. Same thing if I try to run it from terminal.
When clicking on Show graphics Boinc tasks a window opens and closes immediately, to fast to see what's in it.
Wha should I try next?