Is BOINC available in Linux?

From BOINC Wiki
Revision as of 14:02, 5 September 2016 by Jord (talk | contribs) (Copying from the User manual wiki)
Jump to: navigation, search

Linux

You can install BOINC on a Linux computer in any of three ways:

  • Use the package management system of your Linux distribution;
  • Use the "Berkeley installer" provided by BOINC (a self-extracting archive, not distro-specific);
  • Build directly from source code.

Installing BOINC as a package

Some Linux distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, possibly others) have BOINC packages that you can install using your your distro's package manager. Compared to using the Berkeley Installer, this has several advantages:

  • The resulting BOINC installation runs applications under an unprivileged account, and is therefore more secure.
  • 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.
  • BOINC is installed 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.

Here are instructions for several well known Linux distributions:

The Berkeley Installer

The Berkeley Installer is available directly from the BOINC project. It 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_7.2.23_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.

$ mv ~/Desktop/boinc_7.2.23_i686-pc-linux-gnu.sh ~
$ cd ~ 
$ sh boinc_7.2.23_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.

To start the client manually enter the following terminal commands:

$ cd ~/BOINC  
$ ./run_client --daemon
$ ./run_manager

The BOINC working directory can be moved elsewhere as you like, and can even be renamed. One common choice is ~/.boinc, since files and directories with names that begin with "dot" do not show up by default in Unix directory listings. Whatever the name, everything related to the BOINC client is contained within that directory, and you should always run the client and the manager from that working directory.