Installing BOINC

From BOINC

Contents 1 Microsoft Windows 2 Mac OS X 3 Linux 3.1 Installer Sources 3.2 Package Manager 3.3 The Berkeley Installer 3.4 Build from Source 3.5 64 Bit Considerations 3.6 Fedora 3.7 Ubuntu 4 FreeBSD

[edit] Microsoft Windows

Download the installer, then double-click the installer icon.

You can set install options by clicking the "Advanced" button on the configuration screen. The options are:

• Program directory - where BOINC's program files will be stored.
• Data directory - where BOINC's data files will be stored.
• Use BOINC screensaver - Use the BOINC screensaver for the current user.
• Protected application execution - Run project applications under an unprivileged account. This provides increased protection against faulty applications, but it may cause graphics to not work with older applications.
• Allow all users on this computer to control BOINC - If selected (public mode), all users can control BOINC (attach/detach projects, etc.). If not selected (private mode), the only users who can control BOINC are: the installing user, members of the Administrator group, and members of the 'boinc_users' group. When other users run the BOINC Manager, they'll be shown a dialog saying to contact the administrator to add them to the 'boinc_users' group.

To run BOINC invisibly, choose the "Protected application execution" option, then delete the BOINC shortcut from the Start/Programs/BOINC and Start/Programs/Startup menus (locate BOINC in each menu, right-click, select Delete). You can still run the BOINC Manager by going to C:\Program Files\BOINC and double-clicking on boincmgr.exe

[edit] Mac OS X

• Download the installer.
• If your browser has not already done so, expand the zip archive by double-clicking on it in the Finder.
• Double-click on the BOINC Installer application to run the installer, then follow the prompts.
• Close the installer when it is finished. This will automatically launch the BOINC Manager.
• If you want BOINC to be your screen saver, open System Preferences from the Apple menu. Select Desktop & Screen Saver and select BOINCSaver.
• The default location for data directory of BOINC is /Library/Application Support/BOINC Data. You may want to exclude this folder from Time Machine backup system to prevent increase of backup data size.

Several tools for Mac OS X are available to:

• Automatically run BOINC as a daemon or system service at boot time.
• Improve security for stand-alone clients.
• Prevent BOINC Manager from launching automatically when selected users log in.

[edit] Linux

BOINC can be installed on a Linux computer in any of three ways: 1) using the package management system of your Linux distribution; 2) using the installer package from Berkeley; or 3) building directly from source code.

Installing via a package management system is the easiest. Here are instructions for several well known Linux distributions:

• Fedora
• Ubuntu
• Debian
• Gentoo

[edit] Installer Sources

Pre-built package of the BOINC client for Linux are available using package managers, or directly from the BOINC website. It is also possible (though more complex) to build the BOINC client from source code.

[edit] Package Manager

Some Linux distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, possibly others) have BOINC installation packages your distro's package manager can download from your distro's repositories and install on your computer. The advantages of installing via the package manager are:

• the resulting BOINC installation takes advantage of one of Linux's primary security features.
• the BOINC binaries are dynamically linked therefore they require less memory than the binaries in the Berkeley Installer
• the package manager checks for dependencies and installs any additional libraries required to run BOINC on your Linux distro
• installs BOINC as a daemon (BOINC runs automatically at boot time even if no user is logged in)
• BOINC updates can be automated if your Linux distro has automated package update capability (most popular distros do)

If you want to use the packages from repositories, take into account that there are two packages that can be installed separately, one for BOINC Client and another for BOINC Manager. Only the client part is required but you will likely want to install the manager as well unless you intend to manage the client from a remote host.

BOINC is available in 32 bit and 64 bit versions. At this time, November 2008, not all distro repositories that have 32 bit BOINC have 64 bit as well. There is a Berkeley installer that installs 64 bit BOINC. If you install 64 bit BOINC, please read the 64 Bit considerations section below.

[edit] The Berkeley Installer

The Berkeley Installer is available directly from the BOINC project. The disadvantages to using the Berkeley installer are:

• installs BOINC in a way that fails to take advantage of Linux security features.
• the BOINC binaries use more memory than they really need to because several shared libraries are statically linked.
• does not install BOINC as a daemon (service) though you can modify the installation to run as a daemon using instructions below.

The Berkeley Installer for Linux is a self-extracting archive. This type of installation requires that you be familiar with the UNIX command-line interface. The download files have names like boinc_6.2.14_i686-pc-linux-gnu.sh. After downloading the file, you'll need to be in the directory where you download the archive to unpack it.

Here is an example. The archive is downloaded to the desktop. It is then moved to the home directory. Finally BOINC is unpacked and installed. All of this can be done within a regular user account. Root privileges are not needed.

$ cd Desktop           
$ mv boinc_6.2.14_i686-pc-linux-gnu.sh $HOME
$ cd
$ sh boinc_6.2.14_i686-pc-linux-gnu.sh     

This creates a directory called BOINC/ under the home directory containing the following files:

boinc 

The BOINC core client.

boincmgr 

The BOINC Manager.

boinccmd 

A command line tool for controlling a running core client.

run_client 

A script that cd's into the BOINC directory and runs the core client.

run_manager 

A script that cd's into the BOINC directory and runs the manager.

You may want to automatically start the core client at boot time. If you do not want to auto-start BOINC and prefer a manual start method then in a terminal enter

./run_client --daemon; ./run_manager

[edit] Build from Source

BOINC is open source software. You can download the source code and build your own BOINC client, if you so desire, or even set up your own BOINC project. It's not as easy as either of the two methods above, but it may turn out to be more interesting. And some people might even be interested in contributing to the ongoing BOINC development efforts.

If you want to build BOINC on Linux, you need to keep in mind that BOINC consists of both client software and project server software. To run BOINC on your own Linux computer and contribute to existing projects you only need to build the client software.

Instructions for building BOINC from source code are in a separate developer's wiki. You will need to start with these pages:

• Software Prerequisits for Linux
• Getting Source Code
• Building BOINC on Unix

There is also useful documentation on other web sites:

• Building the BOINC Client Software (from the Unofficial BOINC wiki)
• Building BOINC and BOINC Applications on Linux (from Spy Hill) - building the client is a by-product of these old and rather long instructions which were mainly aimed at people who want to set up a BOINC project
• Installing and Running the BOINC client on Unix (from Spy Hill) - how to install and configure the client once you have built it

[edit] 64 Bit Considerations

There are versions of the Berkeley installer that install the 64 bit version of BOINC. At this time, November 2008, 64 bit Ubuntu installs a 64 bit version of BOINC from repositories. It is not known whether other distros have 64 bit BOINC in repository.

If you are running 64 bit Linux and 64 bit BOINC then you might have a problem with projects that issue 32 bit applications rather than 64 bit applications. To allow 32 bit applications to run on 64 bit Linux you must install 32 bit versions of certain shared libraries. The names of the packages containing the 32 bit libraries is different for each distro.

[edit] Fedora

Three packages are required.

Name	Description
compat-libstdc++-296.i386	Compatibility 2.96-RH standard C++ libraries
compat-libstdc++-33.i386	Compatibility standard C++ libraries
compat-libstdc++-33.x86_64	Compatibility standard C++ libraries

Install all 3 packages at once with the following steps:

1. open a terminal and become root.
2. Enter

 yum install compat-libstdc++-296.i386 compat-libstdc++-33.i386 compat-libstdc++-33.x86_64 

[edit] Ubuntu

Four packages are required.

Name	Description
ia32-libs	description is unavailable
libstdc++6	description is unavailable
libstdc++5	description is unavailable
freeglut3	description is unavailable

Install all 4 packages at once with the following steps:

1. Open a terminal.
2. Enter

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs libstdc++6 libstdc++5 freeglut3

[edit] FreeBSD

1. go to /usr/ports/net/boinc-client/, open the Makefile in a text editor
2. change the CONFIGURE_ARGS=--disable-server as follows:
   1. on 32 bit FreeBSD change it to
      CONFIGURE_ARGS=--disable-server --with-boinc-platform=i686-pc-freebsd --with-boinc-alt-platform=i686-pc-linux-gnu
   2. on 64 bit FreeBSD change it to
      CONFIGURE_ARGS=--disable-server --with-boinc-platform=x86_64-pc-freebsd --with-boinc-alt-platform=i686-pc-linux-gnu
3. do make install clean
4. if you receive an error like "ELF 0 ....", make sure you have installed
   1. /usr/ports/emulators/linux_base-fc4 or higher
   2. sysctl kern.elf32.fallback_brand=3

There is additional information on installing, configuring and running BOINC on FreeBSD.