Posts by Rich Alderson

1) Message boards : Questions and problems : what is necessary to build a new command-line BOINC? (Message 19440) Posted 11 Aug 2008 by Rich Alderson Post: We are interested in running SETI on a non-Unix, non-Microsoft, non-Intel platform. Thus my question, what packages are necessary to compile BOINC? So what OS are you compiling for? The proposal is to create a TOPS-20 program for an XKL Toad-1 system currently in an on-line museum and mostly running idle. At the minimum (if you aren't going to use the gnu make tools) you'll need OpenSSL and libcurl. Yes, it's for *nix, but this is one place where the prereqs are spelled out. You'll be interested in the Core Client column. Thanks! That's very helpful. So, Core Client or non-graphical Applications?
2) Message boards : Questions and problems : what is necessary to build a new command-line BOINC? (Message 19386) Posted 9 Aug 2008 by Rich Alderson Post: Depending on the OS you use, all versions have a command line option. The one for Windows is just to run boinc.exe (with these commands) and if necessary from a separate command line window, using the boinccmd tool. Else you can always download and compile the client source code and use the anonymous platform option to run your own Seti@Home application. Yes, thank you. Even the "anonymous platform" assumes that it's just a version of Unix that hasn't been done already.
3) Message boards : Questions and problems : what is necessary to build a new command-line BOINC? (Message 19385) Posted 9 Aug 2008 by Rich Alderson Post: We would like to create a new BOINC client for a CLI-only system (for the hack value as much as anything). The only source packages I find all appear to be for one or another GUI these days, so clearly I'm looking in the wrong places. What packages are necessary to build a command-line BOINC so that we can run SETI@home? Have you read Compiling the core client? Yes, I have. That document assumes that one is running Windows, Mac OS X, some Linux distro, or a BSD derivative other than Mac OS X, and that therefore most of the things needed to compile BOINC are readily available in precompiled form. We are interested in running SETI on a non-Unix, non-Microsoft, non-Intel platform. Thus my question, what packages are necessary to compile BOINC?
4) Message boards : Questions and problems : what is necessary to build a new command-line BOINC? (Message 19312) Posted 7 Aug 2008 by Rich Alderson Post: We would like to create a new BOINC client for a CLI-only system (for the hack value as much as anything). The only source packages I find all appear to be for one or another GUI these days, so clearly I'm looking in the wrong places. What packages are necessary to build a command-line BOINC so that we can run SETI@home?
5) Message boards : BOINC Manager : BOINC 5.8.17 non-installation on Mac OS X.3.9 (Message 11341) Posted 28 Jun 2007 by Rich Alderson Post: [I downloaded 5.10.7 and tried it out yesterday. It still fails in the same way on 10.3.9 (no selectable disk), but it does install on 10.4.8. I'm not ready to move to Tiger from Leopard, but at least I know that I'll be able to re-join the SETI community if I do. UPDATE FOR THOSE STILL READING: NOT A BOINC ISSUE! My apologies to everyone who puzzled over this. As I noted previously, the error reported in the OS X.4 installer log was that the postinstall script was suffering a C-shell error, but no one could tell me where to find the script in question. (I was wrong in my conclusion regarding Mac OS X.4.8, by the way. I could select the disk drive, but the installation failed later (where I could not select the disk at all in earlier versions of BOINC).) I tried running the command-line version of BOINC, and turned in one result to SETI@home doing that, but ye gods what a monster to adminster. This experience showed me that if I were ever to run this again I had to commit to an OS upgrade. I went out and bought a new 36GB SCSI disk drive and installed it into my 7 year old Mac and installed Mac OS 10.4 onto it. After getting all the very latest updates, including compiling a new version of Emacs while I was at it, I was ready to try again. I found the temporary directory into which the installer unfolded things, and located the postinstall script. It's extremely simple, and the error message I received made no sense, as there is no "set" command in the script. But. BUT! My shell on my Mac is tcsh, for historical reasons. I moved to bash in my professional life a long time ago, but didn't feel like schratzing around with getting it compiled for the Mac. I have a lot of old habits embedded in my .cshrc, such as shortening paths to the last two elements in my prompt, and creating an alias of the "cd" command which does that shortening on the fly. The alias uses a "set" to do that, so after a little bit of experimenting, I simply renamed my .cshrc to .cshrc.NOT and re-ran the BOINC installer. IT WORKED! The problem is that if tcsh is invoked as csh on the Mac, it does not allow the tcsh extensions to be used, and the postinstall script starts with a "#!/bin/csh" line. The cd command in the script tried to use my alias (which it should not have done, but that's a different rant for another time), and that is where the syntax error in a "set" came into a script that didn't have a "set" in it. C-shell should never be used in production scripts. There was nothing in this script that could not have been handled by the original Bourne shell. So I lost two months trying to diagnose a problem, annoyed any number of people, and am not too happy with the BOINCsters for that.
6) Message boards : BOINC Manager : BOINC 5.8.17 non-installation on Mac OS X.3.9 (Message 10399) Posted 21 May 2007 by Rich Alderson Post: Startup Disk is happy, Disk Utility permissions verification passes. I also tried running the installer under X.4.8, and was allowed to choose the boot disk for installation, but the installer errored out. The frustrating thing is that I haven't been able to download work for more than a week now, even though the servers are (I believe) back up. Otherwise, I'd never have even tried the new software. Grr.
7) Message boards : BOINC Manager : BOINC 5.8.17 non-installation on Mac OS X.3.9 (Message 10352) Posted 19 May 2007 by Rich Alderson Post: I installed BOINC v5.8.17 on a G4/733 running Mac OS 10.3.9 just a week ago, and didn’t have any such problem. Anything non-standard about your disk configuration, e.g. a software RAID? Nothing non-standard, unless having an external Firewire drive counts. (That would be unfortunate, since I have a 10.4 installation there, for experimentation.) I'm on a G4/450 with 2 IDE and 2 SCSI drives, DVD-RAM and Zip, all internal; 1GB RAM. I've had the system since the G4 series first came out, 7 years ago, and no software problems that have been due to hardware. At least now I know it's my setup.
8) Message boards : BOINC Manager : BOINC 5.8.17 non-installation on Mac OS X.3.9 (Message 10306) Posted 17 May 2007 by Rich Alderson Post: I downloaded the latest BOINC software for Mac via the SETI home page pointer. When I run the installer, it does not recognize any of the disks on the system as a legitimate target for installation. Is this a known issue with 10.3.9? Have I missed something blindlingly obvious to everyone else? NB: The download page states that this version is for 10.3.9 and higher, so I don't expect that to be the problem.

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