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Transitioning to RPM installation of BOINC

Until recently, the BOINC client could only be installed on Linux "by-hand". Now that an RPM package is available, anyone who has installed manually should remove the executables files installed that way.
Last modified: 3 October 2009
The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is an open-source software platform to support distributed computing, primarily for volunteer computing and desktop Grid computing. The BOINC client software runs on Windows, MacOS X, and Unix, but until recently one could only install BOINC on Linux manually.

Now that an RPM package is available to automate the task of installing the BOINC client on Linux, users who have already installed BOINC may want to remove the verison of BOINC they installed manually before installing BOINC via rpm. How you do this depends upon whether you have a "personal" installation or a "system" installation.

Personal Installation

If you have installed BOINC in your own personal account, then the easiest way to make the transision is:
  1. Set all your projects to "no new work" and let all work in the queue finish.
  2. Drag your BOINC directory to the trash
  3. Install from the rpm package and attach to your projects
You can avoid the last step if you save all the "account_...xml files from your BOINC working directory and then put them in /var/lib/boinc after you install the rpm package (and restart the BOINC service).

System Installation

If you have installed BOINC manually as a system daemon (service) then you should do the following to prepare to upgrade from an RPM package:
  1. Remove the the executable files. These are probably 
    	/usr/local/bin/boinc_client  
	/usr/local/bin/boincmgr
	/usr/local/bin/boinc_cmd
    (The last one may or may not be there.)

  2. The RPM package assumes that the BOINC working directory is /var/lib/boinc. If this is not how your existing BOINC installation is configured you can either:

    1. Move the directory to /var/lib/boinc, as described here. or
    2. Edit /etc/sysconfig/boinc to set BOINCDIR to point to the existing directory (see here for details), or
    3. Abandon the existing working directory (delete it and all its contents) and start afresh. Be sure to delete or modify /etc/sysconfig/boinc as well.
      Copyright © 2009 by Spy Hill Research https://www.spy-hill.net/help/boinc/linux-transition.html (served by Islay.spy-hill.com) Last modified: 03 October 2009