I've been using Boinc and before that SETI for many, many years, but I've never tinkered. I'm a passive user, I guess. I let it run in the background, and do not pay much attention to it otherwise.

I wonder what would be the advantage of using the command line version?

Is this a speed issue? If so, is it huge, or?

I'm using a late model iMac with 12G of ram. It's a reasonably fast iCore7. If I can process more units by using the terminal that would be great but is that why there is a different version?

No annoyance intended :-)

Michael

The command line version is exactly the same as the GUI version, but for that there's no GUI attached and that you have to run all commands by the command line, directly on the BOINC binary or through the BOINCCMD command tool.

BOINC doesn't do any calculations, so it cannot be faster in one way or the other. It's the science applications that do the calculations and optimization on them can increase gain in calculation speed etc.

That there is a separate version without GUI available for the Mac is as far as I know for those systems that don't have the X Windows system installed and therefore can't show a GUI; it's also there for the purist who doesn't want to use any GUIs.

Under the other platforms (Linux and Windows) one can just run the Boinc binary without the Boincmgr binary to achieve the same effect.

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Thanks. It's for the cool guys, then… :-)

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Michael Spencer
www.msadesign.com