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Installing on Linux

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David Anderson edited this page Jun 14, 2024 · 9 revisions

BOINC can be installed on a Linux computer in any of several ways.

Package managers

Some Linux distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, possibly others) have BOINC installation packages. The advantages of installing via the package manager are:

  • the resulting BOINC installation runs BOINC as an unprivileged user, increasing security.
  • the package manager checks for dependencies and installs any additional libraries required to run BOINC on your Linux distro
  • installs BOINC 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)

In general 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 if you want a GUI.

The installers start the BOINC client at boot time. How to stop or start the BOINC client after boot.

The Berkeley Installer

The ''Berkeley Installer'' is available directly from the BOINC project.

The installer 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_6.2.14_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. $ cd Desktop $ mv boinc_6.2.14_i686-pc-linux-gnu.sh $HOME $ cd $ sh boinc_6.2.14_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 boinccmd 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.

You may want to automatically start the core client at boot time. If you do not want to auto-start BOINC and prefer a manual start method then in a terminal enter ./run_client --daemon; ./run_manager

Flatpak

The BOINC client is available as a Flatpak

Download a bootable ISO image

Such an image (for Intel architecture, somewhat out of date) is here: https://delta1512.github.io/BOINCOS/

An image for embedded ARM systems: https://github.com/CallMeFoxie/EmbeddedBOINC

These are not maintained by BOINC; use at your own risk.

Running BOINC using Docker

A Docker image containing a BOINC client can be downloaded from here: https://hub.docker.com/r/boinc/client/ You can run this image using Docker on any 64-bit Intel computer (Linux, FreeBSD, Mac, or Windows).

Notes:

  • Idle detection won't work.
  • The image contains an old version of the client; we don't maintain it.
  • You can control the client using a BOINC GUI running locally or remotely.

Build from Source

BOINC is open source software. You can download the source code and build your own BOINC client, if you so desire, or even set up your own BOINC project. It's not as easy as either of the two methods above, but it may turn out to be more interesting. And some people might even be interested in contributing to the ongoing BOINC development efforts.

If you want to build BOINC on Linux, you need to keep in mind that BOINC consists of both client software and project server software. To run BOINC on your own Linux computer and contribute to existing projects you only need to build the client software.

Instructions for building BOINC from source code are in a separate developer's wiki. You will need to start with these pages:

There is also useful documentation on other web sites:

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