Hi,

I newly installed boinc (7.0.24) on my Ubuntu 12.04 fresh install.
From there it always finishes works from:
Seti@home
cosmology@home
with the "output file absent" error.
The other projects work:
World Community Grid
Einstein@home
rosetta@home
milkway@home

How can I diagnose and solve the problem?

All went well back with Ubuntu 11.10

"Output file absent" isn't an error by itself, it's just an indication that something went wrong and the task didn't complete properly.

You need to go to the websites of the projects where the tasks are failing (seti and cosmology), log into your account there, and check the records for the failing computer.

Go into the list of tasks, find one which shows that an error was reported, and click on that task's ID number. At the very least, you'll be able to get the 'Exit status' number, and there may be some more diagnostic information in 'Stderr output'. Those will give you (and us) an idea of where to start looking.

BOINC 7.0.24 and 7.0.25 have a bug that create a lot of exit code 1 errors. That's probably where your "output file absent" errors come from. Why the package maintainers at Ubuntu went for release of a BROKEN BETA BOINC is beyond me (e.g. Berkeley official BOINC 7.0 release is 7.0.25), but since they don't want to burn themselves more, they refuse to release 7.0.27 which has everything fixed.

So you'll have to get this yourself:

There's some hold-up getting the 7.0.27 package backported into 12.04, there was a different bug found, (I haven't had an issue)...

There is the ppa repository, however that was just changed to 7.0.28, and I have not tested it yet so who knows what will or wont work. It should not have the "computation error" bug however as the 12.04 repository package currently does.

If you want to try the package from the ppa repository, (currently 7.0.28)
do (in a terminal):

sudo apt-get remove boinc
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:costamagnagianfranco/boinc
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install boinc

This will add the active ppa repository to your system and install boinc from it. This version gets changed regularly however, so you are more likely to run into problems using this repository, however for now at least you can have something that should work, vs. something that doesn't.

As I mentioned Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal) has a fix in it's repository, but there is some holdup getting that package into 12.04 as 12.04 is a long term support release and they want to make sure once the package is replaced, it will be a version that can be relied on for some time...

With thanks to xclusive585 for hunting that down and writing it up.

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