...the Berkeley build (the .sh installer) is intended primarily for Ubuntu and is almost guaranteed to not work on other popular distros. We expected the BOINC package maintainers to solve that problem but they haven't kept up with the versions recommended by Berkeley and have even distributed non-recommended versions on occasion. They do what they can and that's good enough for a lot of people but if you want something better then I'm with you. I have no intention of whining and asking for better free service. I have every intention of taking the bull by the horns and solving the problem myself or with the help of whoever wants to help.

What I'm talking about is compiling and building Linux for ourselves. It's really not that difficult though I must say I haven't mastered the entire procedure quite yet. I'm over half way there though. The plan is to share with you what I know and hope someone who can fill in the rest of the details will kindly do so.

Building BOINC on 64 bit Fedora

The guide below is a translation from this recently published page. It's up to date as of Spring 2012 and I believe the original author builds on Fedora 16 which is the recommended release as of this writing. It's for 64 bit Fedora but it will likely work just as well on 32 bit. The steps cover everything from start to finish and they are:

1) Create a directory in which to store the source code. I store mine in ~/dev/ so that's what I'll use in the examples below. To accomplish that open a terminal and do:

mkdir ~/dev/

2) Install the subversion package to be able to download the source code plus other required libraries. The command to do all that in one go is:

sudo yum install subversion make m4 libtool autoconf automake GCC-c++ pkgconfig libsqlite3x-devel openssl-devel libcurl-devel wxGTK-devel libjpeg-turbo-devel libX11-devel libnotify-devel

4) Now cd to ~/dev/ and download the source code. The command below fetches the source for BOINC 7.0.25 and will create a directory named boinc_core_release_7_0_25 in the current directory and put the downloaded source in that directory. If you want a different version just change the version number. It will create a directory based on that version number and put the source code in that directory.

svn co http://boinc.berkeley.edu/svn/tags/boinc_core_release_7_0_25

5) Now you're ready to build.

For a portable BOINC that has very few dependences and will probably install on a machine where one does not have admin rights:

cd ~/dev/boinc_core_release_7_0_25
./_autosetup
./configure --disable-server --enable-client-release --build=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu CXXFLAGS="-O3 -funroll-loops -fforce-addr -ffast-math"
make
cd ~/dev/boinc_core_release_7_0_25/packages/generic/sea
make

For a smaller BOINC binary you can install on your personal machine:

cd ~/dev/boinc_core_release_7_0_25
./_autosetup
./configure --disable-server --enable-client CXXFLAGS="-O3"
make
cd ~/dev/boinc_core_release_7_0_25/packages/generic/sea
make

6) In both 2 cases, if all is well, you should find boinc_7_0_25_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu.sh file in ~/dev/boinc_core_release_7_0_25/packages/generic/sea/. Copy boinc_7_0_25_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu.sh to your home directory and run it. It will create ~/BOINC/ in which you will find run_client, run_manager, the 3 BOINC binaries plus other files, same as the Berkeley installer. Click run_manager to launch BOINC client and BOINC manager.

7) If you see an error 2 and/or error 1 when you run 'make' the first time, run 'make clean' in ~/dev/boinc_core_release_7_0_25 then begin again starting from ./_autosetup. Also, after having compiled and installed your new version of BOINC, do a 'make clean' to erase the compile files. You will be able to remove ~/dev/boinc_core_release_7_0_25/ thereafter but first make a backup of boinc_7_0_25_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu.sh in case you need to reinstall BOINC later.


Building BOINC on 64 bit Kubuntu 12.04

The instructions below probably work on 32 bit and regular Ubuntu and Xubuntu too.

1) Create a directory in which to store the source code. I store mine in ~/dev/ so that's what I'll use in the examples below. To accomplish that open a terminal and do:

mkdir ~/dev/

2) Install the subversion package to be able to download the source code plus other required libraries. The command to do all that in one go is:

sudo apt-get -y install subversion make m4 libtool autoconf automake gcc-4.6-base pkg-config libsqlite3-dev libssl-dev libcurl3-gnutls-dev wx2.8-headers libx11-dev libnotify-dev libXmu-dev libXi-dev libjpeg-turbo8-dev libjpeg8-dev libopenjpeg-dev g++ libcurl-openssl-dev wx2.8-i18n

Now continue with steps 3) through 7) from the Building BOINC on 64 bit Fedora section.

I run Kubuntu not Fedora and step 2) provides the list of packages I found I had to install to build on Kubuntu with no errors/warnings. Your Ubuntu system nay need additional packages. Please ask here if you have problems, somebody may be able to help.

As I said, I am not getting any errors/warning when I build but for some reason it builds only boinc but not boincmgr and boinccmd. It doesn't create the .sh installer script either. It's not a big deal since all the important functionality is in boinc but I would like to get it to build boincmgr and boinccmd too.

Can anybody add instructions for openSUSE or other distros?

If anybodybody is having trouble building then please do not post the hundreds of lines of output generated by the build process in these forums. Upload the output to a file drop and post a link that file here along with your question/concern.

Hi,

I put up an article about how to set up VirtualBox and BOINC client for CERN's Test4Theory project at

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/red-hat-fedora-linux/194517-how-set-up-virtualbox-boinc-client-test4theory-fedora-18-a.html#post916908.

The instructions are for Fedora 18 32-bit and include details on how to compile the BOINC client.

John Noggle