Well, I have officially run out of spare parts from old machines to build boxes. So now I will be spending my time learning more about Linux and and researching parts for better/newer machines until I go back to work.
I think I stated before that I had settled on Linux Mint 17 for my distro. I had not dealt with Linux for around 10 years when I decided to get into crunching back in June. Mint seems to be a good transition distro for someone like me with little current knowledge of Linux.
I have tried several other distros and they just didn't work for me. I'm NOT bashing any of them by any means. All are fine OS's and have their place. A good point was made by robl about the ease of working with a GUI. This is just my personality talking, but working with a command line just doesn't do it for me.
I bought an AMD GPU and after some good advice in another thread was able to get it working. Right up until I tried to change the clock settings. The screen blanked and would not come back. Is this the cards fault? Nope. It's my fault for not knowing what to do to fix it using a command line. I took the card back and got an Nvidia card in it's stead.
The point of all this? Don't get me wrong. I like AMD. Over the last several years of building Windows boxes I almost always put AMD in for graphics. They build fine products and the top crunchers are using them. I'm just not willing to have to use a command line because AMD won't support a "full" driver with the overclocking controls for Linux. I chose to stick with Nvidia because I don't have to jump thru command line hoops to set up my cards. When a full driver is available for AMD I'll revisit them for my Linux boxes.
Finally, on a lighter note... I like a challenge. Since, for now, I'll be using Nvidia until a good, easy to use Linux driver comes out for AMD, maybe I can figure out how to give those AMD boys at the top of the food chain a run for their money. Yeah, in my dreams!
I bought an AMD GPU and after some good advice in another thread was able to get it working. Right up until I tried to change the clock settings. The screen blanked and would not come back. Is this the cards fault? Nope. It's my fault for not knowing what to do to fix it using a command line. I took the card back and got an Nvidia card in it's stead.
The point of all this? Don't get me wrong. I like AMD. Over the last several years of building Windows boxes I almost always put AMD in for graphics. They build fine products and the top crunchers are using them. I'm just not willing to have to use a command line because AMD won't support a "full" driver with the overclocking controls for Linux. I chose to stick with Nvidia because I don't have to jump thru command line hoops to set up my cards. When a full driver is available for AMD I'll revisit them for my Linux boxes.
Phil
Phil, my best performing computer is an Ubu 14.04 Linux box with an AMD Pitcairin GPU. Its outperforming the other Ubu boxes running NVIDIA. The driver I used was a direct download from the AMD site. While I have not installed the latest driver available I understand that it provides additional configuration options which might make for easier change outs on newer kernels. At least this is my understanding.
[Edit] I did have to use the command line to run the AMD driver download but it was fairly straight forward. When the kernel changes out I will also have to run the driver command line again for the new kernel to pick up the driver. I have had this same experience though with NVIDIA on Linux.
I bought an AMD GPU and after some good advice in another thread was able to get it working. Right up until I tried to change the clock settings. The screen blanked and would not come back. Is this the cards fault? Nope. It's my fault for not knowing what to do to fix it using a command line. I took the card back and got an Nvidia card in it's stead.
I absolutely understand why you did what you did. AMD just cannot, absolutely cannot, make a friendly driver. They can't. Someone's going to say, "I've never had any trouble." All I can say is they are especially blessed.
Me? I spent a little over an hour with a 32-bit Win 8.1 Pro machine trying to get it to run again.
Why?
Because whatever Microsoft updated threw the whole thing out of whack to the point that I couldn't boot the machine. The video kept blinking in, the driver would crash, it would recover, it would fail, faster than I could click on anything to make it stop.
I couldn't get it booted into safe mode.
The card was working. The machine would POST and I could get into the BIOS, but even safe mode selection was somehow or other too late.
I had to remove the card from the system, boot using graphics on the motherboard, which had updated the onboard NVIDIA gpu driver (there's the probable problem), then use driver sweeper to get rid of the AMD drivers, wipe the subdirectories with anything AMD, clean the registry, reboot, wipe the NVIDIA drivers, clean the registry, re-boot, re-install the card, re-install the latest beta driver which seems to be the only one that includes an OpenCL setup that my old 6770 could use.
That's WAY too much trouble to recover a machine that was working prior to a Microsoft update.
Now, having said all of that --- you are ultimately going to regret the decision. Whatever garbage you were having to "learn" to make the idiot AMD drivers cooperate with Linux would eventually have been worth it; at least for Einstein@Home.
In fact, I was sort-of counting-on your learning it well enough in Mint to be able to tell me what to do when I get there. (That will be some time in the future, unfortunately. It might even not-happen until Windows 7 is no longer supported.)
Anyway, I'm not happy with my AMD cards (because of AMD's "package" of driver difficulties that they've had since Windows 3.1), but I am very happy with the price/performance choice that the R9 series seems to represent.
It blows my mind that I once made the same decision you have made, back when the Earth was young, for much the same reasons. WHY doesn't AMD just make a good uninstaller package, or a good re-installer package, or... anything, to help the ignorant end-user cope more easily? I LOVED my ATI cards, but spending a couple of hours every other week making the @#$#@ things work was just more trouble than I was willing to deal with.
You'd think that as badly as AMD / ATI need every possible fraction of a market share that they'd get about five guys in a room and FIX the issues, even if it took a year. I don't think it would add too much to the company's annual billion dollar losses to hire someone to FIX IT. I could be wrong, and I'm sure I am, but from my ignorant self's position it "feels" like a competent installer/uninstaller would make everyone's life much easier.
Let's bring this back to Linux Distro's for a bit...I too installed the version Gary suggested but Boinc is not in the list of apps to download, like it is on the Ubuntu list. I installed it on a 2gb ram, dual core Dell D830 laptop that went thru 5 years of college before I got it. The distro works GREAT, it is fast and very useful, except no Boinc, to me that is a deal breaker as without Boinc it doesn't need to be running, I have plenty of other pc's, and even an i7 laptop running 24/7.
I'm very sorry for not having mentioned how to get around this 'deal breaker'. Earlier, Phil mentioned that he had decided on Linux Mint so I didn't continue explaining what to do to get BOINC running on PCLinuxOS.
A few years ago, BOINC did exist in the repo but it took a looong time to get updated. I can understand this because there are 10s of thousands of potential packages all of which have to be 'packaged' correctly for the particular distro. The labour to do this is provided by volunteers, who might have other more pressing stuff to work on. I found out very early on that the berkeley supplied stuff works 'as is' as long as you check for and install any missing dependencies. Fortunately, this is trivial to do. So, I did use 6.10.58 which was in the repo at the time but then migrated to berkeley versions when I wanted to use something newer - 6.12.43 springs to mind. I didn't actually notice when the PCLinuxOS maintainers decided to drop BOINC.
To install the berkeley version, just download it first. It is a shell archive (it has a .sh extension). Put the file somewhere, your home directory would be fine. Open a Konsole terminal session there and give the command
sh boi
The key will do filename completion so as long as you don't have any other files starting 'boi' in your home directory, the full filename will be completed and once you hit the key, the shell will unpack the archive, creating a 'BOINC_X.Y.Z' subdirectory with the BOINC stuff inside, including some scripts to run BOINC (which I always delete, since I do things a bit differently). If you need suggestions on exactly how to run BOINC, just ask.
The only current missing dependency (up to BOINC 7.2.42) is WxWidgets 2.8 that is needed by BOINC manager. There are versions up to 2.9.5 in the repos. I'm pretty sure I saw somewhere that BOINC 7.3.X and later needs WxWidgets 3.x and if that's true you wouldn't be able to run the latest BOINC alphas on PCLinuxOS (until they eventually upgrade that package again). You could actually run the 7.3.X client with a 7.2.42 manager since it's only the manager that needs WxWidgets.
PCLinuxOS uses a GUI front end (called Synaptic) to apt-get so package maintenance doesn't need a CLI. To install WxWidgets, just use the search box and type in the string "libwxgtku2" (without the quotes) for the 32bit version or "lib64wxgtku2" if you have a 64bit OS. There will be about 5 things that match - just pick the standard "2.8" entry and mark it for installation. A further dependency will also be given, so mark that as well. You then "apply" the changes and the packages will be installed.
I think it's a real advantage not to use a distro supplied BOINC, quite apart from the fact that it's immediately available as soon as berkeley releases it - without having to wait for someone to package it. It seems that most distros require that BOINC stuff belongs to the user 'boinc' and the group 'boinc' and that the BOINC directory is /var/lib/boinc/. Unless you make /var live on a separate disk partition, (or save a copy somewhere beforehand) the BOINC stuff will get clobbered if you have to reinstall the OS.
For me (when I used to run Windows) I had 5 partitions on a 20GB disk - WinC, WinD (for BOINC), /, /home and swap. There was no way I wanted an extra /var partition. I used the above arrangement for the changeover period when I was trying out Linux but keeping Windows (just in case).
These days I'm still using many 20GB disks but just the three Linux partitions. Any user files (including BOINC stuff) live under /home/gary/ and are completely unaffected by a reinstall. There's a lot of KDE configuration saved as well so a reinstall is quite trivial and (unless I'm going to resize partitions) I don't even bother backing up. All BOINC stuff has owner:group of gary:gary so there are no permissions issues if I edit or copy BOINC stuff.
Also, I don't want BOINC to start automatically when a machine reboots. The only time a machine reboots is if there has been a software upgrade, a hardware upgrade, a power failure or a hardware issue. In each of those cases, I like to check things out without BOINC running. When I'm happy with things, I click an icon on the desktop and BOINC is launched. This has saved things getting trashed further on a number of occasions.
If you need further information about anything, just ask.
... Its like you said someone starting out with Linux should avoid the bare bone format. In my opinion, start with a desktop version because of the simplicity of configuring Linux through GUI interfaces.
The KDE-MiniMe version is not 'bare bones'. There is a proper KDE desktop environment just the same as the standard 'non MiniMe' version. The standard version is more than twice the size and wont fit on a CD. The stuff that is left out is mainly the 'bloat' that a standard multi-purpose desktop/office/media-center type machine would need to have. This is stuff you don't need in a crunching box.
The only thing 'advanced' about the MiniMe version is the time it would take you to browse through all the extra packages and install all the extra functionality that has been left out deliberately. The MiniMe version is perfect for crunching. It's very easy to install a few extras - like firefox for example if you wanted that.
Let's bring this back to Linux Distro's for a bit...I too installed the version Gary suggested but Boinc is not in the list of apps to download, like it is on the Ubuntu list. I installed it on a 2gb ram, dual core Dell D830 laptop that went thru 5 years of college before I got it. The distro works GREAT, it is fast and very useful, except no Boinc, to me that is a deal breaker as without Boinc it doesn't need to be running, I have plenty of other pc's, and even an i7 laptop running 24/7.
I'm very sorry for not having mentioned how to get around this 'deal breaker'. Earlier, Phil mentioned that he had decided on Linux Mint so I didn't continue explaining what to do to get BOINC running on PCLinuxOS.
A few years ago, BOINC did exist in the repo but it took a looong time to get updated. I can understand this because there are 10s of thousands of potential packages all of which have to be 'packaged' correctly for the particular distro. The labour to do this is provided by volunteers, who might have other more pressing stuff to work on. I found out very early on that the berkeley supplied stuff works 'as is' as long as you check for and install any missing dependencies. Fortunately, this is trivial to do. So, I did use 6.10.58 which was in the repo at the time but then migrated to berkeley versions when I wanted to use something newer - 6.12.43 springs to mind. I didn't actually notice when the PCLinuxOS maintainers decided to drop BOINC.
To install the berkeley version, just download it first. It is a shell archive (it has a .sh extension). Put the file somewhere, your home directory would be fine. Open a Konsole terminal session there and give the command
sh boi
The key will do filename completion so as long as you don't have any other files starting 'boi' in your home directory, the full filename will be completed and once you hit the key, the shell will unpack the archive, creating a 'BOINC_X.Y.Z' subdirectory with the BOINC stuff inside, including some scripts to run BOINC (which I always delete, since I do things a bit differently). If you need suggestions on exactly how to run BOINC, just ask.
The only current missing dependency (up to BOINC 7.2.42) is WxWidgets 2.8 that is needed by BOINC manager. There are versions up to 2.9.5 in the repos. I'm pretty sure I saw somewhere that BOINC 7.3.X and later needs WxWidgets 3.x and if that's true you wouldn't be able to run the latest BOINC alphas on PCLinuxOS (until they eventually upgrade that package again). You could actually run the 7.3.X client with a 7.2.42 manager since it's only the manager that needs WxWidgets.
PCLinuxOS uses a GUI front end (called Synaptic) to apt-get so package maintenance doesn't need a CLI. To install WxWidgets, just use the search box and type in the string "libwxgtku2" (without the quotes) for the 32bit version or "lib64wxgtku2" if you have a 64bit OS. There will be about 5 things that match - just pick the standard "2.8" entry and mark it for installation. A further dependency will also be given, so mark that as well. You then "apply" the changes and the packages will be installed.
I think it's a real advantage not to use a distro supplied BOINC, quite apart from the fact that it's immediately available as soon as berkeley releases it - without having to wait for someone to package it. It seems that most distros require that BOINC stuff belongs to the user 'boinc' and the group 'boinc' and that the BOINC directory is /var/lib/boinc/. Unless you make /var live on a separate disk partition, (or save a copy somewhere beforehand) the BOINC stuff will get clobbered if you have to reinstall the OS.
For me (when I used to run Windows) I had 5 partitions on a 20GB disk - WinC, WinD (for BOINC), /, /home and swap. There was no way I wanted an extra /var partition. I used the above arrangement for the changeover period when I was trying out Linux but keeping Windows (just in case).
These days I'm still using many 20GB disks but just the three Linux partitions. Any user files (including BOINC stuff) live under /home/gary/ and are completely unaffected by a reinstall. There's a lot of KDE configuration saved as well so a reinstall is quite trivial and (unless I'm going to resize partitions) I don't even bother backing up. All BOINC stuff has owner:group of gary:gary so there are no permissions issues if I edit or copy BOINC stuff.
Also, I don't want BOINC to start automatically when a machine reboots. The only time a machine reboots is if there has been a software upgrade, a hardware upgrade, a power failure or a hardware issue. In each of those cases, I like to check things out without BOINC running. When I'm happy with things, I click an icon on the desktop and BOINC is launched. This has saved things getting trashed further on a number of occasions.
If you need further information about anything, just ask.
THANK YOU VERY MUCH. As soon as the bike race ends today, noon my time, I will use your instructions and get Boinc up and running with no more problems, fingers are crossed.
The KDE-MiniMe version is not 'bare bones'. There is a proper KDE desktop environment just the same as the standard 'non MiniMe' version. The standard version is more than twice the size and wont fit on a CD. The stuff that is left out is mainly the 'bloat' that a standard multi-purpose desktop/office/media-center type machine would need to have. This is stuff you don't need in a crunching box.
The only thing 'advanced' about the MiniMe version is the time it would take you to browse through all the extra packages and install all the extra functionality that has been left out deliberately. The MiniMe version is perfect for crunching. It's very easy to install a few extras - like firefox for example if you wanted that.
When I referrred to the PCLinux MiniMe as being "advanced" those were not my words but the words used by the PCLinux website in referring to their MiniMe product.
Today I decided to download the PCLinux MiniMe 64 bit ISO from their site and see for myself what all the fuss is about. I burned it to a DVD (plenty of room to spare) and installed in on Dell Laptop running the Broadcom Chip Set for the Wireless NIC interface. It took me two attempts to install it. This was due in part to my not being as familiar with this release as I am with Ubuntu. I screwed up the Timezone entry and "found what I thought" was a GUI for changing the Timezone. With each change it reverted back to the "wrong one" entered during installation. I decided to reinstall and this time selected the correct one. Installation proceded without much effort as it did the first time. I stayed with default options. I was now you and I know not to be true.faced with a need to change the monitor resolution. Again, like the Timezone issue, I could change the resolution, "apply" it, and "save as default". When I logged off then on it reverted back to the original resolution. So I logged off and rebooted. Logging back in brought me to a desktop running the original resolution, not the one I wanted and "saved as default". Poking around I realized that there were two "configure options": 1. Configure your desktop and 2. Configure your computer. If you make changes using "Configure your desktop" the changes will not take effect. However if you use "Configure your computer" then the changes do get saved and are preserved across about. I suppose it should have been obvious to me to use "Configure your computer". But why have two configure options to effect changes. Its slightly misleading and for the NEW guy it will be frustrating. All you have to do is Google "PCLinux will not retain screen resolution across reboot" to see the number of people who had this problem.
During the install I do not recall asking to provide a "hostname". Yes you can do this from the command line, but a "man hostname" produces nothing. If fact a man of the basic Linux command line commands do not exist, i.e., ls, ping, df, etc. This is a loss for the new person running Linux.
The default install produced the following output from a "df":
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 12G 2.5G 8.7G 23% /
/dev/sda6 131G 251M 131G 1% /home
What. A default install give 12 gig to "/" and 131 gig to /home. Really. I know there is a way to modify partioning during install but again a new guy would not necessarily have the ability to do this without much effort. I would not run with these defaults.
What follows is a default install on Ubuntu. Here is the df output:
I had to hunt up a way to disable the touchpad on my Dell. There is a app/prog to do this and I installed it but you have to know this. In Ubu it is part of the options for mouse.
I do have to say that I was quite surprised/pleased that this version of PCLinux was able to accurately install/define my Broadcom wireless NIC. Ubuntu makes you jump through some hooks to accomplish this. PCLinux just did it. No jumping necessary. A big improvement for network configuration
I would consider PCLinux as a good choice for crunching but I would not recommend it to an individual that has limited or no Linux experience. A new person venturing into the Linux world needs to be able to progress quickly so that he/she can build their confidence level and "feel good about Linux". I believe that other PCLinux options or other Linux distros would help them accomplish this, but not the MiniMe option and not the Ubuntu server option. If they spend too much time getting just the basics working they will swear that Windows is "the best thing since sliced bread". Some thing many of us know not to be true.
During the install I do not recall asking to provide a "hostname". Yes you can do this from the command line, but a "man hostname" produces nothing.
Maybe you need to be root to do that. Some distros don't let regular users to see man pages for programs that only root can run. If it's not your case, try "apropos hostname".
During the install I do not recall asking to provide a "hostname". Yes you can do this from the command line, but a "man hostname" produces nothing.
Maybe you need to be root to do that. Some distros don't let regular users to see man pages for programs that only root can run. If it's not your case, try "apropos hostname".
All distros I have used ask for a hostname during installation. It is possible that I missed it but I did do two installs. apropos not installed by default. running man from "root", i.e. "# man hostname" does not produce a result. In fact "man" is not installed.
When I referrred to the PCLinux MiniMe as being "advanced" those were not my words but the words used by the PCLinux website in referring to their MiniMe product.
I was specifically referring to 'bare bones' in case readers thought PCLinuxOS didn't have a fully functional DE. It's 'stripped' of non-essential stuff which is what you want for a pure crunching box. The only reason they call it "advanced" is that they really want users to get all the standard stuff in a standard install rather than have them come back complaining that they don't have the full gamut of apps you would expect on a fully outfitted machine.
In an earlier message in this thread, I posted a link to an installation howto which shows quite a bit of the disk partitioning stuff. Yes you can accept defaults and let the installer carve up the disk for you but I would strongly suggest you do what is shown in the howto and select the custom option. It's a full GUI process of creating partitions, selecting the type of filesystem you want, sizing them to your heart's content (dragging a slider) and selecting mount points from drop down menus. Sure, you need to know that you should have a least root, swap and home partitions (as is mentioned in the howto) and that root and home should be of type 'ext4', whilst the swap partition is of type 'linux swap'. If you play around with the options you find on these screens you will discover that it's a pretty simple procedure to get exactly what you want. If you make a mistake you can 'cancel' with a single click and go back to the start to try again. And, as you intimated, the first time you try something new and unfamiliar, it's bound to seem more difficult than it actually is.
I'd like to address a couple of individual points.
Quote:
Poking around I realized that there were two "configure options": 1. Configure your desktop and 2. Configure your computer.
"Configure your computer" is also known as the PCC (PCLinuxOS Control Centre) which is a really nice GUI way to configure a lot of (but not all) things on the system immediately after installation. You should always use this first to set up what you can. "Configure your Desktop" is a tool specific to KDE configuration. In most cases, the default configuration of KDE is quite satisfactory but if you want to change the look and feel of your KDE desktop and tweak a few things, this is the tool to use.
There is a very small amount of duplication between the two - setting the timezone is certainly one. You actually get asked what your BIOS clock is set to (UTC or local) and you get asked to set the timezone during the first reboot after the install. I used to set the BIOS clock to local but now I use UTC because I read somewhere that there are bugs in handling daylight saving correctly in some localities that are avoided with a UTC setting. I also select the option to use NTP (with an appropriate time server from a drop down list) to keep the time correct and it works really well on all hosts.
So the basic steps are I use are:
* Install the OS,
* Reboot,
* Use PCC to configure things associated with the entire machine including static IP address,
* Use the CLI to edit /etc/hosts /etc/sysconfig/network /etc/apt/sources.list (you can easily do this last one later by GUI from within Synaptic),
* Logout and immediately log back in to pick up the above config changes,
* Use Synaptic to mark and apply all updates and extra stuff you want to install (including things like hardware drivers that weren't installed originally - like drivers for AMD GPUs),
* Use PCC again (Hardware -> Video) if an AMD fglrx driver has been installed. This will 'see' the proprietary driver and ask you if you want to use it. Click 'yes',
* Reboot again to ensure that all configuration and updates are fully operational, and finally,
* Use the "Configure your Desktop" icon to explore all the things you can tweak to make your desktop look and feel the way you want it to.
Quote:
During the install I do not recall asking to provide a "hostname".
You aren't asked, a default is used which you need to deal with manually. It's something missing from the install procedure but fairly easy to rectify once you know how. You can use the hostname command to set a hostname but it won't survive a reboot. There is a file called "network" that lives in /etc/sysconfig. If you add a line at the top of the file saying "HOSTNAME=xxxx" then the name you choose there will become permanent.
Quote:
Yes you can do this from the command line, but a "man hostname" produces nothing. If fact a man of the basic Linux command line commands do not exist, i.e., ls, ping, df, etc. This is a loss for the new person running Linux.
This is in keeping with the philosophy of MiniMe. We are talking about a group of machines dedicated to crunching. Within that group, you can nominate one machine from which you will control the group. You could install the standard version of PCLinuxOS on that machine and I think you will have the man pages as part of that bigger install. I don't know that for certain as I've put the MiniMe version on everything. If I want to view a man page, I use an online man page service like this one.
If you want to view a man page installed on your machine, you have to open a terminal session and use a (shock, horror) CLI command of 'man xxxx' where xxxx is the name of the command in question. If it's a multi-page document, you need to know how to manipulate the pager that's doing the displaying of the information. For someone learning, I think it's easier to find and browse the online html pages using a standard browser of their choice. If you check out the link I provided you'll see a variety of ways to find info including a search box where you can type in the command name and get not only the command but also closely related stuff. When you actually open the html page, the presentation seems to be superior to the standard display in a terminal session.
Quote:
The default install produced the following output from a "df":
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 12G 2.5G 8.7G 23% /
/dev/sda6 131G 251M 131G 1% /home
What. A default install give 12 gig to "/" and 131 gig to /home. Really. I know there is a way to modify partioning during install but again a new guy would not necessarily have the ability to do this without much effort. I would not run with these defaults.
I would (for a crunching box) since there's plenty of room for the OS to grow with only 23% used. I've used around 5 - 7 GB for the root partition for years and never had problems. I want to have all my spare space for user files on /home. If you ever need to reinstall the OS, you will be able to leave everything in /home completely untouched.
In any case, as mentioned earlier, selecting custom partitioning and getting what you want size-wise is quite simple and straight forward.
Quote:
I had to hunt up a way to disable the touchpad on my Dell. There is a app/prog to do this and I installed it but you have to know this. In Ubu it is part of the options for mouse.
Try opening PCC -> Hardware and under "Configure Mouse and Keyboard" there is a "Setup pointer device (mouse and touchpad)". I don't have any touchpads so I've never used this.
If you don't get any joy there, try opening "Configure your Desktop" and select "Startup and Shutdown" in the System Administration section at the bottom of the page. On the menu at the left, click "Service Manager" and under "Startup Services" you will see a "KDE touchpad enabler daemon" which is enabled by default. Try unticking the box and see if that does what you want. I always disable a number of these services that I know I wont need for crunching.
There are a few other very useful things to know for improving the setup. Also there's a couple more hints for running BOINC. I'll deal with them in a future post.
Hi all, Well, I have
)
Hi all,
Well, I have officially run out of spare parts from old machines to build boxes. So now I will be spending my time learning more about Linux and and researching parts for better/newer machines until I go back to work.
I think I stated before that I had settled on Linux Mint 17 for my distro. I had not dealt with Linux for around 10 years when I decided to get into crunching back in June. Mint seems to be a good transition distro for someone like me with little current knowledge of Linux.
I have tried several other distros and they just didn't work for me. I'm NOT bashing any of them by any means. All are fine OS's and have their place. A good point was made by robl about the ease of working with a GUI. This is just my personality talking, but working with a command line just doesn't do it for me.
I bought an AMD GPU and after some good advice in another thread was able to get it working. Right up until I tried to change the clock settings. The screen blanked and would not come back. Is this the cards fault? Nope. It's my fault for not knowing what to do to fix it using a command line. I took the card back and got an Nvidia card in it's stead.
The point of all this? Don't get me wrong. I like AMD. Over the last several years of building Windows boxes I almost always put AMD in for graphics. They build fine products and the top crunchers are using them. I'm just not willing to have to use a command line because AMD won't support a "full" driver with the overclocking controls for Linux. I chose to stick with Nvidia because I don't have to jump thru command line hoops to set up my cards. When a full driver is available for AMD I'll revisit them for my Linux boxes.
Finally, on a lighter note... I like a challenge. Since, for now, I'll be using Nvidia until a good, easy to use Linux driver comes out for AMD, maybe I can figure out how to give those AMD boys at the top of the food chain a run for their money. Yeah, in my dreams!
Phil
RE: Hi all, I bought an
)
Phil, my best performing computer is an Ubu 14.04 Linux box with an AMD Pitcairin GPU. Its outperforming the other Ubu boxes running NVIDIA. The driver I used was a direct download from the AMD site. While I have not installed the latest driver available I understand that it provides additional configuration options which might make for easier change outs on newer kernels. At least this is my understanding.
[Edit] I did have to use the command line to run the AMD driver download but it was fairly straight forward. When the kernel changes out I will also have to run the driver command line again for the new kernel to pick up the driver. I have had this same experience though with NVIDIA on Linux.
RE: I bought an AMD GPU
)
I absolutely understand why you did what you did. AMD just cannot, absolutely cannot, make a friendly driver. They can't. Someone's going to say, "I've never had any trouble." All I can say is they are especially blessed.
Me? I spent a little over an hour with a 32-bit Win 8.1 Pro machine trying to get it to run again.
Why?
Because whatever Microsoft updated threw the whole thing out of whack to the point that I couldn't boot the machine. The video kept blinking in, the driver would crash, it would recover, it would fail, faster than I could click on anything to make it stop.
I couldn't get it booted into safe mode.
The card was working. The machine would POST and I could get into the BIOS, but even safe mode selection was somehow or other too late.
I had to remove the card from the system, boot using graphics on the motherboard, which had updated the onboard NVIDIA gpu driver (there's the probable problem), then use driver sweeper to get rid of the AMD drivers, wipe the subdirectories with anything AMD, clean the registry, reboot, wipe the NVIDIA drivers, clean the registry, re-boot, re-install the card, re-install the latest beta driver which seems to be the only one that includes an OpenCL setup that my old 6770 could use.
That's WAY too much trouble to recover a machine that was working prior to a Microsoft update.
Now, having said all of that --- you are ultimately going to regret the decision. Whatever garbage you were having to "learn" to make the idiot AMD drivers cooperate with Linux would eventually have been worth it; at least for Einstein@Home.
In fact, I was sort-of counting-on your learning it well enough in Mint to be able to tell me what to do when I get there. (That will be some time in the future, unfortunately. It might even not-happen until Windows 7 is no longer supported.)
Anyway, I'm not happy with my AMD cards (because of AMD's "package" of driver difficulties that they've had since Windows 3.1), but I am very happy with the price/performance choice that the R9 series seems to represent.
It blows my mind that I once made the same decision you have made, back when the Earth was young, for much the same reasons. WHY doesn't AMD just make a good uninstaller package, or a good re-installer package, or... anything, to help the ignorant end-user cope more easily? I LOVED my ATI cards, but spending a couple of hours every other week making the @#$#@ things work was just more trouble than I was willing to deal with.
You'd think that as badly as AMD / ATI need every possible fraction of a market share that they'd get about five guys in a room and FIX the issues, even if it took a year. I don't think it would add too much to the company's annual billion dollar losses to hire someone to FIX IT. I could be wrong, and I'm sure I am, but from my ignorant self's position it "feels" like a competent installer/uninstaller would make everyone's life much easier.
RE: Let's bring this back
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I'm very sorry for not having mentioned how to get around this 'deal breaker'. Earlier, Phil mentioned that he had decided on Linux Mint so I didn't continue explaining what to do to get BOINC running on PCLinuxOS.
A few years ago, BOINC did exist in the repo but it took a looong time to get updated. I can understand this because there are 10s of thousands of potential packages all of which have to be 'packaged' correctly for the particular distro. The labour to do this is provided by volunteers, who might have other more pressing stuff to work on. I found out very early on that the berkeley supplied stuff works 'as is' as long as you check for and install any missing dependencies. Fortunately, this is trivial to do. So, I did use 6.10.58 which was in the repo at the time but then migrated to berkeley versions when I wanted to use something newer - 6.12.43 springs to mind. I didn't actually notice when the PCLinuxOS maintainers decided to drop BOINC.
To install the berkeley version, just download it first. It is a shell archive (it has a .sh extension). Put the file somewhere, your home directory would be fine. Open a Konsole terminal session there and give the command
sh boiThe key will do filename completion so as long as you don't have any other files starting 'boi' in your home directory, the full filename will be completed and once you hit the key, the shell will unpack the archive, creating a 'BOINC_X.Y.Z' subdirectory with the BOINC stuff inside, including some scripts to run BOINC (which I always delete, since I do things a bit differently). If you need suggestions on exactly how to run BOINC, just ask.The only current missing dependency (up to BOINC 7.2.42) is WxWidgets 2.8 that is needed by BOINC manager. There are versions up to 2.9.5 in the repos. I'm pretty sure I saw somewhere that BOINC 7.3.X and later needs WxWidgets 3.x and if that's true you wouldn't be able to run the latest BOINC alphas on PCLinuxOS (until they eventually upgrade that package again). You could actually run the 7.3.X client with a 7.2.42 manager since it's only the manager that needs WxWidgets.
PCLinuxOS uses a GUI front end (called Synaptic) to apt-get so package maintenance doesn't need a CLI. To install WxWidgets, just use the search box and type in the string "libwxgtku2" (without the quotes) for the 32bit version or "lib64wxgtku2" if you have a 64bit OS. There will be about 5 things that match - just pick the standard "2.8" entry and mark it for installation. A further dependency will also be given, so mark that as well. You then "apply" the changes and the packages will be installed.
I think it's a real advantage not to use a distro supplied BOINC, quite apart from the fact that it's immediately available as soon as berkeley releases it - without having to wait for someone to package it. It seems that most distros require that BOINC stuff belongs to the user 'boinc' and the group 'boinc' and that the BOINC directory is /var/lib/boinc/. Unless you make /var live on a separate disk partition, (or save a copy somewhere beforehand) the BOINC stuff will get clobbered if you have to reinstall the OS.
For me (when I used to run Windows) I had 5 partitions on a 20GB disk - WinC, WinD (for BOINC), /, /home and swap. There was no way I wanted an extra /var partition. I used the above arrangement for the changeover period when I was trying out Linux but keeping Windows (just in case).
These days I'm still using many 20GB disks but just the three Linux partitions. Any user files (including BOINC stuff) live under /home/gary/ and are completely unaffected by a reinstall. There's a lot of KDE configuration saved as well so a reinstall is quite trivial and (unless I'm going to resize partitions) I don't even bother backing up. All BOINC stuff has owner:group of gary:gary so there are no permissions issues if I edit or copy BOINC stuff.
Also, I don't want BOINC to start automatically when a machine reboots. The only time a machine reboots is if there has been a software upgrade, a hardware upgrade, a power failure or a hardware issue. In each of those cases, I like to check things out without BOINC running. When I'm happy with things, I click an icon on the desktop and BOINC is launched. This has saved things getting trashed further on a number of occasions.
If you need further information about anything, just ask.
Cheers,
Gary.
RE: ... Its like you said
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The KDE-MiniMe version is not 'bare bones'. There is a proper KDE desktop environment just the same as the standard 'non MiniMe' version. The standard version is more than twice the size and wont fit on a CD. The stuff that is left out is mainly the 'bloat' that a standard multi-purpose desktop/office/media-center type machine would need to have. This is stuff you don't need in a crunching box.
The only thing 'advanced' about the MiniMe version is the time it would take you to browse through all the extra packages and install all the extra functionality that has been left out deliberately. The MiniMe version is perfect for crunching. It's very easy to install a few extras - like firefox for example if you wanted that.
Cheers,
Gary.
RE: RE: Let's bring this
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THANK YOU VERY MUCH. As soon as the bike race ends today, noon my time, I will use your instructions and get Boinc up and running with no more problems, fingers are crossed.
RE: The KDE-MiniMe version
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When I referrred to the PCLinux MiniMe as being "advanced" those were not my words but the words used by the PCLinux website in referring to their MiniMe product.
Today I decided to download the PCLinux MiniMe 64 bit ISO from their site and see for myself what all the fuss is about. I burned it to a DVD (plenty of room to spare) and installed in on Dell Laptop running the Broadcom Chip Set for the Wireless NIC interface. It took me two attempts to install it. This was due in part to my not being as familiar with this release as I am with Ubuntu. I screwed up the Timezone entry and "found what I thought" was a GUI for changing the Timezone. With each change it reverted back to the "wrong one" entered during installation. I decided to reinstall and this time selected the correct one. Installation proceded without much effort as it did the first time. I stayed with default options. I was now you and I know not to be true.faced with a need to change the monitor resolution. Again, like the Timezone issue, I could change the resolution, "apply" it, and "save as default". When I logged off then on it reverted back to the original resolution. So I logged off and rebooted. Logging back in brought me to a desktop running the original resolution, not the one I wanted and "saved as default". Poking around I realized that there were two "configure options": 1. Configure your desktop and 2. Configure your computer. If you make changes using "Configure your desktop" the changes will not take effect. However if you use "Configure your computer" then the changes do get saved and are preserved across about. I suppose it should have been obvious to me to use "Configure your computer". But why have two configure options to effect changes. Its slightly misleading and for the NEW guy it will be frustrating. All you have to do is Google "PCLinux will not retain screen resolution across reboot" to see the number of people who had this problem.
During the install I do not recall asking to provide a "hostname". Yes you can do this from the command line, but a "man hostname" produces nothing. If fact a man of the basic Linux command line commands do not exist, i.e., ls, ping, df, etc. This is a loss for the new person running Linux.
The default install produced the following output from a "df":
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 12G 2.5G 8.7G 23% /
/dev/sda6 131G 251M 131G 1% /home
What. A default install give 12 gig to "/" and 131 gig to /home. Really. I know there is a way to modify partioning during install but again a new guy would not necessarily have the ability to do this without much effort. I would not run with these defaults.
What follows is a default install on Ubuntu. Here is the df output:
/dev/sda1 205G 18G 177G 10% /
udev 7.9G 4.0K 7.9G 1% /dev
tmpfs 1.6G 1.1M 1.6G 1% /run
none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
none 7.9G 152K 7.9G 1% /run/shm
I had to hunt up a way to disable the touchpad on my Dell. There is a app/prog to do this and I installed it but you have to know this. In Ubu it is part of the options for mouse.
I do have to say that I was quite surprised/pleased that this version of PCLinux was able to accurately install/define my Broadcom wireless NIC. Ubuntu makes you jump through some hooks to accomplish this. PCLinux just did it. No jumping necessary. A big improvement for network configuration
I would consider PCLinux as a good choice for crunching but I would not recommend it to an individual that has limited or no Linux experience. A new person venturing into the Linux world needs to be able to progress quickly so that he/she can build their confidence level and "feel good about Linux". I believe that other PCLinux options or other Linux distros would help them accomplish this, but not the MiniMe option and not the Ubuntu server option. If they spend too much time getting just the basics working they will swear that Windows is "the best thing since sliced bread". Some thing many of us know not to be true.
RE: During the install I
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Maybe you need to be root to do that. Some distros don't let regular users to see man pages for programs that only root can run. If it's not your case, try "apropos hostname".
RE: RE: During the
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All distros I have used ask for a hostname during installation. It is possible that I missed it but I did do two installs. apropos not installed by default. running man from "root", i.e. "# man hostname" does not produce a result. In fact "man" is not installed.
RE: When I referrred to the
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I was specifically referring to 'bare bones' in case readers thought PCLinuxOS didn't have a fully functional DE. It's 'stripped' of non-essential stuff which is what you want for a pure crunching box. The only reason they call it "advanced" is that they really want users to get all the standard stuff in a standard install rather than have them come back complaining that they don't have the full gamut of apps you would expect on a fully outfitted machine.
In an earlier message in this thread, I posted a link to an installation howto which shows quite a bit of the disk partitioning stuff. Yes you can accept defaults and let the installer carve up the disk for you but I would strongly suggest you do what is shown in the howto and select the custom option. It's a full GUI process of creating partitions, selecting the type of filesystem you want, sizing them to your heart's content (dragging a slider) and selecting mount points from drop down menus. Sure, you need to know that you should have a least root, swap and home partitions (as is mentioned in the howto) and that root and home should be of type 'ext4', whilst the swap partition is of type 'linux swap'. If you play around with the options you find on these screens you will discover that it's a pretty simple procedure to get exactly what you want. If you make a mistake you can 'cancel' with a single click and go back to the start to try again. And, as you intimated, the first time you try something new and unfamiliar, it's bound to seem more difficult than it actually is.
I'd like to address a couple of individual points.
"Configure your computer" is also known as the PCC (PCLinuxOS Control Centre) which is a really nice GUI way to configure a lot of (but not all) things on the system immediately after installation. You should always use this first to set up what you can. "Configure your Desktop" is a tool specific to KDE configuration. In most cases, the default configuration of KDE is quite satisfactory but if you want to change the look and feel of your KDE desktop and tweak a few things, this is the tool to use.
There is a very small amount of duplication between the two - setting the timezone is certainly one. You actually get asked what your BIOS clock is set to (UTC or local) and you get asked to set the timezone during the first reboot after the install. I used to set the BIOS clock to local but now I use UTC because I read somewhere that there are bugs in handling daylight saving correctly in some localities that are avoided with a UTC setting. I also select the option to use NTP (with an appropriate time server from a drop down list) to keep the time correct and it works really well on all hosts.
So the basic steps are I use are:
* Reboot,
* Use PCC to configure things associated with the entire machine including static IP address,
* Use the CLI to edit /etc/hosts /etc/sysconfig/network /etc/apt/sources.list (you can easily do this last one later by GUI from within Synaptic),
* Logout and immediately log back in to pick up the above config changes,
* Use Synaptic to mark and apply all updates and extra stuff you want to install (including things like hardware drivers that weren't installed originally - like drivers for AMD GPUs),
* Use PCC again (Hardware -> Video) if an AMD fglrx driver has been installed. This will 'see' the proprietary driver and ask you if you want to use it. Click 'yes',
* Reboot again to ensure that all configuration and updates are fully operational, and finally,
* Use the "Configure your Desktop" icon to explore all the things you can tweak to make your desktop look and feel the way you want it to.
You aren't asked, a default is used which you need to deal with manually. It's something missing from the install procedure but fairly easy to rectify once you know how. You can use the hostname command to set a hostname but it won't survive a reboot. There is a file called "network" that lives in /etc/sysconfig. If you add a line at the top of the file saying "HOSTNAME=xxxx" then the name you choose there will become permanent.
This is in keeping with the philosophy of MiniMe. We are talking about a group of machines dedicated to crunching. Within that group, you can nominate one machine from which you will control the group. You could install the standard version of PCLinuxOS on that machine and I think you will have the man pages as part of that bigger install. I don't know that for certain as I've put the MiniMe version on everything. If I want to view a man page, I use an online man page service like this one.
If you want to view a man page installed on your machine, you have to open a terminal session and use a (shock, horror) CLI command of 'man xxxx' where xxxx is the name of the command in question. If it's a multi-page document, you need to know how to manipulate the pager that's doing the displaying of the information. For someone learning, I think it's easier to find and browse the online html pages using a standard browser of their choice. If you check out the link I provided you'll see a variety of ways to find info including a search box where you can type in the command name and get not only the command but also closely related stuff. When you actually open the html page, the presentation seems to be superior to the standard display in a terminal session.
I would (for a crunching box) since there's plenty of room for the OS to grow with only 23% used. I've used around 5 - 7 GB for the root partition for years and never had problems. I want to have all my spare space for user files on /home. If you ever need to reinstall the OS, you will be able to leave everything in /home completely untouched.
In any case, as mentioned earlier, selecting custom partitioning and getting what you want size-wise is quite simple and straight forward.
Try opening PCC -> Hardware and under "Configure Mouse and Keyboard" there is a "Setup pointer device (mouse and touchpad)". I don't have any touchpads so I've never used this.
If you don't get any joy there, try opening "Configure your Desktop" and select "Startup and Shutdown" in the System Administration section at the bottom of the page. On the menu at the left, click "Service Manager" and under "Startup Services" you will see a "KDE touchpad enabler daemon" which is enabled by default. Try unticking the box and see if that does what you want. I always disable a number of these services that I know I wont need for crunching.
There are a few other very useful things to know for improving the setup. Also there's a couple more hints for running BOINC. I'll deal with them in a future post.
Cheers,
Gary.