Hi Nicolas,
i am interested. What would you do:
1. a wrapper (GUI) for the command line version of boinc, or
2. a java application which communicate via (XML ?) rpc calls with boinc. Is there any public information/specification for this interface?

Communicating via XML directly. Using boinc_cmd would be an abuse...

The protocol isn't documented. You'd need to go to the C++ code and figure it out. Which isn't easy, since all elements are 1:1 XML dumps of the internal structures.

Would anybody be interested on a Java library to do GUI RPCs? You could make a BOINC Manager clone in Java, or do some standalone apps for useful things that you can't do on the manager, like aborting a lot of tasks.

If there is interest, I'll bump it up on my (big) to-do list (I have already started; I'm just adjusting priorities on my dozen half-done projects).

The ubuntu download works as far as the "Connect to a project" dialog. I won't be checking the client any further as I only want the manager on this virtual machine. I do get the message:

Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "gnomebreakpad": libgnomebreakpad.so:
  cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

but this does not stop the programs starting up.

I just downloaded Boinc and got the following output:

17-Dec-2007 13:44:02 [---] Starting BOINC client version 5.10.28 for i686-pc-linux-gnu
17-Dec-2007 13:44:02 [---] log flags: task, file_xfer, sched_ops
17-Dec-2007 13:44:02 [---] Libraries: libcurl/7.16.0 OpenSSL/0.9.8d zlib/1.2.3
17-Dec-2007 13:44:02 [---] Data directory: /home/grad/havillam/Desktop/BOINC
17-Dec-2007 13:44:02 [---] Processor: 2 GenuineIntel Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz [Family 15 Model 4 Stepping 1]
17-Dec-2007 13:44:02 [---] Processor features: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl cid xtpr
17-Dec-2007 13:44:02 [---] OS: Linux: 2.6.22.1-41.fc7
17-Dec-2007 13:44:02 [---] Memory: 1009.96 MB physical, 2.00 GB virtual
17-Dec-2007 13:44:02 [---] Disk: 2.50 GB total, 1.30 GB free
17-Dec-2007 13:44:02 [---] Local time is UTC -5 hours
17-Dec-2007 13:44:02 [---] No general preferences found - using BOINC defaults
17-Dec-2007 13:44:02 [---] Preferences limit memory usage when active to 504.98MB
17-Dec-2007 13:44:02 [---] Preferences limit memory usage when idle to 908.96MB
17-Dec-2007 13:44:02 [---] Preferences limit disk usage to 1.21GB
17-Dec-2007 13:44:31 [---] [error] GUI RPC bind failed: 98
gstate.init() failed: -180

Any idea what is wrong?

OS version:
Linux version 2.6.22.1-41.fc7 (kojibuilder@xenbuilder4.fedora.phx.redhat.com) (gcc version 4.1.2 20070502 (Red Hat 4.1.2-12)) #1 SMP Fri Jul 27 18:10:34 EDT 2007

Fedora release 7 (Moonshine)
Kernel r on an m


Thanks