Hi

I believe I have a mismatched version of BOINC.
The screen saver appears to be an older version from 2014.
I'm running Knoppix Linux which is a variant of Debian.
The version of Boinc I'm running is version (7.6.33+dfsg-12),
which my OS tells me is the latest version.

Is it possible to get the correct version of boincscr?

Regards

Michael B.
P.S Boinc software information follows.
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 959992 Jul 4 2018 boinc
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 34212 Jul 4 2018 boinccmd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2478484 May 30 2017 boincmgr
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 288996 Jan 3 17:33 boincscr

You can get BOINC manager from the PPA (https://launchpad.net/~costamagnagianfranco/+archive/ubuntu/boinc) This will give you 7.16.3

This is still officially a testing version so may have some minor bugs. I am running that version after rolling my own from git-hub and have not experienced any problems with it so far but because it is a testing version, mine will be slightly different from that one unless I happened to do it from exactly the same zip file.

There also hasn't been a change to the code of the screen saver in absolute forever, I am not even sure it'll work under most Linux repo's.

So it doesn't really matter if the boincscr binary is built against today's date or that of several years ago.

BTW, 7.6 33 was from June 6, 2016

---

Hi

So having a mismatched version of boinscr should not matter?

In that case, the problem becomes "screensaver loading" and that is as far as it gets.

Regards

Michael B

And the answer is probably in the post before yours:

I am not even sure it'll work under most Linux repo's.

I don't have it in Mint, which is a Debian > Ubuntu > derivative.

The BOINC screen saver requires the X-server. But aside from that it also needs graphics apps to work with the science apps from the project. The project should provide both.

Which I know some do for Windows. But don't know if any does that for Linux. I think you'll have to build the graphics apps yourself with the project's open source code, where available.

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From screensaver_x11.cpp:

// This is a XScreenSaver compatible BOINC screensaver for Unix/X11.
//
// To use this screensaver, please add the following to the 'programs'
// preference in your .xscreensaver file:
//
// GL: "boincscr -root \n\"
//
// If your BOINC directory differs from /var/lib/boinc, you can use
// the -boinc_dir command line argument.
//
// When run, this screensaver connects to the BOINC client via RPC, asks for
// graphics providing tasks and starts a random graphics application. The window
// created by the graphics appliacation is then searched for using X11 window
// properties, such as "WM_COMMAND". Not every graphics application seems to
// support this, but this method has been successfully tested with Einstein@Home
// and climateprediction.net. When the graphics application window
// has been found, it will be embedded into the XScreenSaver-provided
// fullscreen-window, the root window, the preview window or a newly created
// window, depending on the environment, using the XEMBED method.

Not every graphics application seems to
// support this, but this method has been successfully tested with Einstein@Home
// and climateprediction.net.

Climateprediction.net no longer supports graphics. The person who did the graphics left the project for other work some years ago. Also running the graphics resulted in a measurable hit to the computing. It was however useful at that time because some of the model types would sometimes get stuck in a loop and this could be spotted by looking at the graphics. Fortunately it is many years since I last had a task get stuck in a loop like that.

Yes that comment in the file was from many years ago. I would say in general that most projects have dropped screensavers because they simply are not needed anymore and the screensaver steals process time and resources away from the science app.