Oh, boy I used to run BOINC many years ago. Every now and then I tried to rerun it but it never worked anymore with current Ubuntu releases. Today, I tried it with the latest 7.2.42 and finally it got back working. But both of my projects don't start calculating - the news messages say:

"Rosetta Mini needs 953.67MB more disk space. You currently have 0.00 MB available and it needs 953.67 MB."
"SETI@home v8 needs 32.00MB more disk space. You currently have 0.00 MB available and it needs 32.00 MB."

but 0.00 MB is a lie. My settings are:

X use no more than 10 GB
x at least let 10 GB free

I uncompressed it in a separate partion - so not the system and also not the home partition, but a partiotion with
630 GB free disk space.

Is this a known bug?

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BOINC 7.2.42 (x86_64) on Linux Ubuntu 16.04 (64 Bit), AMD APU 7850K 3.7 GHz, 32 GB RAM.

A confusing cause of this error message can be that the boinc data directory is not write & execufe enabled for the user. Guess how I found that one :-(

A confusing cause of this error message can be that the boinc data directory is not write & execufe enabled for the user. Guess how I found that one :-(

That sounds to me like a general stylistic error in BOINC code. We ought to add to the 'BOINC coding style' manual that when iterating through a cascade of possible error conditions, the final one should always be "Aw shucks - something unexpectedly bad happened", rather than a specific statement like 'zero disk space available'.

A similar condition happens when a Windows Manager fails to connect to a client. It always falls through to 'incorrect password' when something unlisted happens.

And having added it to the coding style, we have to find and eradicate where the bad practice occurs. At the next full code review.

Rob, could you verify by experiment that the problem is still as you describe - setting the directory read only causes the 'no disk space' error to show? (i doubt no-execute applies in this case, but might still be worth checking). If verified, I'll raise it as an 'Issue'.

will do. when I get home in about a week.
currently stuck in a pub in Liverpool due the high winds this morning....

Could you post the contents of global_prefs.xml for me, and if it exists, the contents of global_prefs_override.xml as well?

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