It would be nice if someone took the time to make a nice, simple package installer for the Mac command line version. I'd be much happier running that version in our labs (100+ iMacs--mostly running 10.6.x), but the installation is pretty daunting under the best of circumstances.

I really don't care about the screensaver side of things with the GUI app; I use it because the install is a piece of cake. Even this mere English and American Literature and Language major (Eastern Michigan University, 1976) can handle it with equanimity.

Even with an experienced UNIX person walking me through the installation, all I could think was that all this command line hu-hu was exactly why I moved to the Mac 25 years ago.

my mbp sleeps when on batter or plugged in... i'd report it but i'm not seeing this behavior...

simplify the entire remote host procedure. i'm relatively new to boinc and can't seem to quite figure out the remote host control concept.

simplify the entire remote host procedure. i'm relatively new to boinc and can't seem to quite figure out the remote host control concept.

See http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Controlling_BOINC_remotely

This option is only there so you can control another BOINC installation, with BOINC manager or one of the 3rd party Managers, from your computer. Or your BOINC from another computer. Since the underlying client still runs on the remote computer, all activities that it does will be done on the remote computer, not the one you're controlling it from. This includes uploading, downloading etc.

These functions will not be taken over by the controlling computer.

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keychain integration would be really good. btw, where BOINCmanager stores the password currently?

keychain integration would be really good. btw, where BOINCmanager stores the password currently?

The manager doesn't store passwords.

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I am willing to have BOINC run in the background but "background" means "background". I do not want to see it either in the dock or in the menubar, let alone in both, as I do now. Surely a more appropriate way to handle a background application would be to build it as a panel in system preferences and offer the choice of displaying an icon in the menubar.

I am willing to have BOINC run in the background but "background" means "background". I do not want to see it either in the dock or in the menubar, let alone in both, as I do now. Surely a more appropriate way to handle a background application would be to build it as a panel in system preferences and offer the choice of displaying an icon in the menubar.

You might want to run the BOINC Client as a service, as explained here.

You can then go into System Preferences -> Accounts -> Login Items and remove the Login Item for BOINC Manager. (You can also do this in OS 10.6 Snow Leopard by control-clicking on the BOINC Manager's Dock icon and unchecking "Options->Open at Login")

This will allow the BOINC Client to run silently in the background (even when no one is logged in) but the BOINC Manager (the GUI part of BOINC with icons in the Doc and Menubar) won't start up automatically. You then just launch the BOINC Manager when you want to inspect or control BOINC.

By the way, the above web page is listed in the ReadMe that comes with BOINC for the Mac in the paragraph which begins with "For more options...."

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Charlie Fenton
BOINC / SETI@home Macintosh & Windows Programmer

keychain integration would be really good. btw, where BOINCmanager stores the password currently?

The manager doesn't store passwords.

hmm... could you please explain how authentication process is implemented? first I supplied email and password to join a project, then manager logs in automagically even after upgrade.

hmm... could you please explain how authentication process is implemented? first I supplied email and password to join a project, then manager logs in automagically even after upgrade.

The technical method is shown here.

+1 to providing an option to hide the menu bar icon since the dock icon is always present when the manager is running.

Sometime, BOINC manager can not handle Mac's sleep.
When the manager mishandled Mac's sleep, all task were displayed as 'Suspended CPU is busy' forever.
But the CPU were not busy at all.
In order to get out this situation, I need reboot of Mac.

Linux version BOINC manager has no problem.

My BOINC manager(Mac) version is 6.12.33(x86)

i wish more support for PowerPC macs !

I wish two things!

Point BOINC to any other drive in Mac for installation or just drive space using. Installing BOINC only to System drive is not good for me (or using for BOINC purposes), and ZFS support if possible. I have a Mac Pro 2007 with two 4 core Xeons, HD 4870 and two RAID sets. For general purposes i used 3TB Mirrored RAID set with ZFS filesystem partition for the good of data. System drive is a RAID-0 set of two SSDs for performance and there is small amount of space..

Point BOINC to any other drive in Mac for installation or just drive space using. Installing BOINC only to System drive is not good for me (or using for BOINC purposes).

Please see http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Tools_for_Mac_OS_X#Moving_BOINC_Manager_or_BOINC_Data_Folder_to_a_Different_Drive for how to do that.

As for ZFS support, if BOINC can't be stored on and run from that file system, then I think you should ask the ZFS maintainers to add BOINC support, not the other way around. See http://code.google.com/p/maczfs/ for more information. (It's like asking BOINC for NTFS support...)

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Big thanks for the fast reply! :) Will try!

It works normal under ZFS.

Can an option be added to the BOINC Manager to "Not show in Dock"? Its nice to have running in the Menu Bar but it really doesn't need to be duplicated.

This would be nice for BOINC Manager under any OS, but my house is Mac heavy. I am a student who comes and goes at irregular times. Scheduling my computers to do work at certain times and not others is useful but not suitably efficient. I am either interrupting my piping hot MacBook Pro or it is sitting there idling while I'm away. What I would like is bluetooth integration so that, when my phone is in range, BOINC stops and I have a nice, cool, quite computer to work at while, when my phone is out of range, BOINC kicks in and gets to work curing cancer and finding aliens. This feature might also work based on network MAC addresses, so that when my hone connects to my wireless network its MAC address prompts BOINC to stop all running projects. I'll leave it to the BOINC team to figure out the details. It would be nice to schedule the times that proximity detection is taken into consideration as well. My phone will be in range between 12AM and 5AM every night, but BOINC can ignore my presence since I will be asleep. Finally, since I have four computers running BOINC, having them all stop when I arrive home would be ideal. They are all noisy and in my living room. Manually stopping four computers every hour so I can hear the TV during an unexpected weekday off is tedious.

The other thing that has crossed my mind is the ability to choose whether or not projects run while my laptop is charging. It can take a few hours for it to charge, even without any running. With projects running, I've had my laptop take 7 hours to charge fully.

My wishlist for the Mac (I currently run version 7.0.25 on OSX 10.7.4):

- minor fix: when you want to close the application and the pop-up 'are you sure you want to close, etc' comes up. If you hit Enter, it doesn't respond. The 'Ok' option is already preselected, so Enter should push the button.
- Growl support, when a task has been completed, new tasks are fetched. Make settings for it, so users can select what they want to be notified of.
- graphics, moving molecules. When the graphics kick in, it's actually not only a scientific relevant application to run, but it's also just really cool. Cool also can attract more users, more computing power. At the moment, it's just to plain.

- Maybe a social aspect would be nice too. If some project has a breakthrough or important advances, let people know. Or fun facts, like real-time analytics, how many tasks are being sent, received by the hour, active users by city, country, ranks, etc. Could also be done through the app.

I've tried to use this method to move my data folder in both Snow Leopard and Lion, for some reason I am unable to get it to work. My system drive is a small SSD drive (40GB) and space on it is very tight. Therefore I have to keep BOINC to less than 2GB of space. Having a built in ability to designate a data folder on any drive would be great.

Point BOINC to any other drive in Mac for installation or just drive space using. Installing BOINC only to System drive is not good for me (or using for BOINC purposes).

Please see http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Tools_for_Mac_OS_X#Moving_BOINC_Manager_or_BOINC_Data_Folder_to_a_Different_Drive for how to do that.