I'm brand new to Linux and just managed to install Ubuntu on an old PC (separate partition, dual-boot w/Win XP). Unfortunately, I'm having trouble installing and running the BOINC client and manager. I'm following the instructions given at the BOINC website to do the install from the Ubuntu repository, but it's not successful. Here's the output I get following the install command:

ritterm@linuxbox:~$ sudo aptitude install boinc-manager
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
Writing extended state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
boinc-client{a} boinc-manager
0 packages upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/2195kB of archives. After unpacking 6054kB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] y
Writing extended state information... Done
Preconfiguring packages ...
Selecting previously deselected package boinc-client.
(Reading database ... 102745 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking boinc-client (from .../boinc-client_6.2.12-1_i386.deb) ...
Selecting previously deselected package boinc-manager.
Unpacking boinc-manager (from .../boinc-manager_6.2.12-1_i386.deb) ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up boinc-client (6.2.12-1) ...
* Starting BOINC core client: boinc [ OK ]
* Setting up scheduling for BOINC core client and children: [ OK ]

Setting up boinc-manager (6.2.12-1) ...

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
Writing extended state information... Done

ritterm@linuxbox:~$

Continuing with the instructions, I entered the command to start the client as a daemon at boot time:

ritterm@linuxbox:~$ /sbin/chkconfig boinc-client on
bash: /sbin/chkconfig: No such file or directory

I then tried to manually start the client daemon (per the instructions) and again, no joy:

ritterm@linuxbox:~$ /sbin/service boinc-client start
bash: /sbin/service: No such file or directory

I've tried this process several times, all with the same result. I used the synaptic package manager to remove previous installations and even tried the install using synaptic.

I realize that this may be an Ubuntu issue since I'm using the repository install, but I'm hoping I can get some help here.

Thanks for any ideas.

MarkR

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Don't quote me on this, but I think `service` is a Red Hat thing.

You can try (as root) /etc/init.d/boinc start

I use Fedora and I don't use their package, so I'm not much help. Does the *buntu package not start automatically at boot?

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Kathryn :o)

I don't know about Red Hat -- I was just following these instructions for installing BOINC under Ubuntu. I can't start the daemom manually (/sbin/service) or set it to run at boot time (/sbin/chkconfig). Neither command is in the /sbin directory.

Thanks to a suggestion in an Ubuntu forum, I found that I could start the BOINC manager from Applications -> System Tools. After starting the managerI was able to attach to all my projects.

I still don't know how to start the client as a daemon to run at system boot.

The "service" command is Red Hat not Debian (which Ubuntu is based on) so that wiki page needs correction. And chkconfig is also Red Hat specific.

I think I know how to do this on Ubuntu but I've not yet tested it. If there is a 'boinc' script in /etc/init.d then you should be able to turn it on with the command

update-rc.d boinc defaults

(You'll have to run that command as root or via sudo.) Then the client core should start as a daemon at the next reboot.

To start it earlier, try the command

/etc/init.d/boinc start

which should work on both Ubuntu/Debian and on Red Hat/Fedora machines.

I'll try to test this out on my Ubuntu laptop in the next day or two.

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-- Eric Myers

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats

The "service" command is Red Hat not Debian (which Ubuntu is based on) so that wiki page needs correction. And chkconfig is also Red Hat specific.

I've commented out that line in the instructions. Once we know what works on Debian based systems, I (or someone else) can change it to reflect the Debian way.

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Kathryn :o)

Thanks, Eric.

The "service" command is Red Hat not Debian (which Ubuntu is based on) so that wiki page needs correction. And chkconfig is also Red Hat specific.

I think I know how to do this on Ubuntu but I've not yet tested it. If there is a 'boinc' script in /etc/init.d then you should be able to turn it on with the command

update-rc.d boinc defaults

(You'll have to run that command as root or via sudo.) Then the client core should start as a daemon at the next reboot.

There is a "boinc-client" script in /etc/init.d. When I run the update command as you suggest, I get the following output:

ritterm@linuxbox:/etc/init.d$ update-rc.d boinc-client defaults
System startup links for /etc/init.d/boinc-client already exist.
ritterm@linuxbox:/etc/init.d$

Being new to Linux/Ubuntu I can't be sure, but it looks to me like installing from the repo sets the client up to run as a daemon at boot time. I don't think it's necessary to do anything else.

Everything seems to be running okay for me now: the client starts at boot, I'm crunching WUs, and the manager is functioning. BOINC life is good... :-)

The "service" command is Red Hat not Debian (which Ubuntu is based on) so that wiki page needs correction. And chkconfig is also Red Hat specific.

I've commented out that line in the instructions. Once we know what works on Debian based systems, I (or someone else) can change it to reflect the Debian way.

Thanks, Kathryn. From a newbie's perspective, I think it might be a good idea to add a step or comment in the "Basic Installation" part of the instructions indicating that the manager can be started from Applications -> System Tools -> BOINC Manager.

Dagorath wrote:

I've modified useful commands for managing the daemon to seperate Fedora specific commands from Ubuntu specific commands.

Thanks for all your work on that wiki page. Starting and stopping the daemon from the command line is the same in any Linux, so I've modified the page to show how that's done in a separate initial section. Then there are separate sections for Fedora/Red Hat and Ubuntu/Debian on the commands used to turn on/off the daemon at boot time. This is rough, so hopefully someone will review the changes and improve upon it?

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-- Eric Myers

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats

Good idea. Done.

Thanks for reporting the above issues, rtterm.

Glad to help and thanks for the feedback. :-)

MarkR

Dagorath wrote:

The same commands for all the distros. I like that.

Me too. It's not always possible, but when it is we should use it.

When I wrote the init script I took some pains to make sure it would work for all distros.

That section says use update-rc.d boinc-client defaults to turn the daemon on for Ubuntu. If it also gave the command to turn the daemon off then it would be complete. Anybody know that command?

According to the man page it would be

update-rc.d boinc-client remove

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-- Eric Myers

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats

@ritterm: what version of Ubuntu are you using? I'm trying the install on a ThinkPad with Hardy Heron (8.04.1) and find that it does not install cleanly if BOINC has not been on the machine before. Your output shows BOINC 6.2.12, while I seem to be getting 5.10.45-1ubuntu1. I wonder if there are different versions of the BOINC packages for different versions of Ubuntu.

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-- Eric Myers

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats

@ritterm: what version of Ubuntu are you using? I'm trying the install on a ThinkPad with Hardy Heron (8.04.1) and find that it does not install cleanly if BOINC has not been on the machine before. Your output shows BOINC 6.2.12, while I seem to be getting 5.10.45-1ubuntu1. I wonder if there are different versions of the BOINC packages for different versions of Ubuntu.

That could very well be, Eric. I'm running 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) and it pulled BOINC version 6.2.12 from the repo. That seems a little odd to me, though, since that was a pre-release version.

Dagorath wrote:

Nicolas recently posted a list of the Ubuntu versions and the BOINC version for each. See this post. I use Fedora so can't confirm.

That is helpful. Thanks.

I've done a bit more of tweaking and testing the documentation for Ubuntu, using a ThinkPad on which I installed a while ago Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). It seems that the package Ubuntu installs, boinc-5.10.45-1ubuntu1, is probably slightly broken. Two things I notice:

* The init script is not installed
* The /etc/boinc-client directory is not properly populated, causing the client to fail when started

As a result, my experience was that on a system with BOINC completely removed, the boinc-client package fails to install properly.

From the discussion above it looks like 8.10 (Ibex) works, though that should also be tested more thoroughly. But 8.04 is a LTS release ("Long Term Support") and so I would expect Ubuntu to make a newer version of the BOINC package available for it, not just 8.10. I personally would like to see 8.04 support continued just because it's a LTS release and so I can tell people to use it and it will be maintained for a longer time.

Who are the maintainers of the Ubuntu packages and how to we contact them about this?

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-- Eric Myers

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats

* The init script is not installed

Odd. I haven't seen a problem like that on any of my hardy installs. /etc/init.d/boinc-client has always been there and is used to manage [start/stop/status] the client and also auto-start the client at boot time.

* The /etc/boinc-client directory is not properly populated, causing the client to fail when started

Again, to me this is somewhat odd.
IIRC the file ownerships were a bit wonky (set to root), but a quick sudo chown boinc:boinc /etc/boinc-client/* is usually enough to sort that out. I haven't had a client fail to start due to that though.

As a result, my experience was that on a system with BOINC completely removed, the boinc-client package fails to install properly.

I can't say the same. I've never had a problem installing boinc on hardy. It's always been a simple case of:
sudo aptitude install boinc-client
sudo aptitude install boinc-manager

Saving to global_prefs_override is a problem unless you do the chown as I mentioned above.

I had a quick look at the install instructions on the wiki. (should have done that first)
Further discussion probably should be done one the wiki discussion page.... sorry for the thread hijack....

Okay, I think I've cleared up some of my own confusion. Thanks to Chris pointing out the difference between `aptitude remove` and `aptitude purge` I did a full purge of the client package. After that a fresh installation seems to have worked fine (but I'll check more tomorrow). So my problems were probably due to having a strange configuration due to partial removal or my moving some directories out of the way to preserve files while testing.

So I take it back, 5.10.45 does seem to work for Hardy, the problem was just me :-)

Further detailed discussion in the wiki talk pages:
Talk:Installing BOINC on Ubuntu, and
Talk:Stop or start BOINC daemon after boot

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-- Eric Myers

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats