BOINC!

I decided to try and do something useful with my computer, and set up BOINC so I could choose from a list of projects to use my computing cycles.

Ok, so I just pulled in the debian package with aptitude but after installation then it didn't run as a daemon as the document describes so I decided to run it from the command line. That's where my troubles began.

I understood from the documentation that you could run boinc from the command line and choose some projects to support and voila, everything would be up and running.

What happened to me was that I choose some projects but I didn't get any work to do, my client was querying the projects for work but none was given (sometimes I got a message saying that the project needed x amount of disk space but I had 0 Mb available when in fact I had more then 9 Gb available). I was getting a bit frustrated but decided to try and run the program as a daemon instead.

That on the other hand did work! Now I am happily doing my work and my computer is doing someone else's work for me ;-)

So if you try to run the boinc client from command line as a normal user then it wont work, you have to be logged in as user boinc or run the client as a daemon. At least that's how it works here in debian land.

Ohh yeh, I decided to go with Rosetta@home and climateprediction.net