Installing the BOINC client

This document describes the generic installation procedure for the BOINC client

The installation procedure itself is broken into four steps

    1. Downloading the Source
    2. Configuration
    3. Building
    4. Running the BOINC client

Please note that BOINC currently only supports the targets all clean install
uninstall and tar. Currently, BOINC is installed into the /usr/local/boinc/
directory structure. To install BOINC into a different directory structure,
the macro INSTALL_DIR needs to be edited in the client/Makefile.in file.

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Downloading the Source

BOINC is distributed via CVS and tarballs compressed with gzip. 

The BOINC client distribution includes the core client and the application 
library. 

Unpack the distribution in one directory using the commands
    % gunzip boinc_client.tar.gz
    % tar xf boinc_client.tar

If installing from CVS, the boinc/client, boinc/api, boinc/lib, and 
boinc/RSAEuro directories must be downloaded. The boinc/doc directory may be
downloaded if documentation is desired. 

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Configuration

Like most open source software, BOINC must be configured before it can be
built. This document describes the recommended configuration procedure for
both native and cross targets. 

We use srcdir to refer to the toplevel source directory for BOINC. 

In general, BOINC need not be built into a seperate directory from the source. 

Second, when configuring a native system, either cc or gcc must be in your path
or you must set CC in your environment variables before running configure. 
Otherwise, the configuration scripts may fail. 

To configure the BOINC client: 

    % cd srcdir/client
    % ./configure

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Building

Now that BOINC is configured, you are ready to build BOINC

Some commands executed when making BOINC may fail (return a nonzero status) and
be ignored by make.

It is normal to have compiler warnings when compiling certain files. These
warnings can be safely ignored unless you are a member of the development team.

To make the BOINC client:

    % cd srcdir/client
    % make

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Running the BOINC client

The first time the BOINC client is run, it will prompt the user for some
information, including the master url of the project the user wishes to join,
the username, and an authenticator. The file will then attempt to contact the
master url to get information about scheduling servers and attempt to begin
working on the project. After this first time running, the output from the 
BOINC client may be redirected to /dev/null. The client can accept two
command line options, -exit_when_idle, which will cause the client to exit
when a scheduling server replies with a no work available message, and the
-exit_after N, which will cause the client to exit after approximately N
seconds. It is recommended that a value of N greater than 100 be given when
using this option.