HI,
What is the preferred window manager on Linux for BOINC?
I converted an old Win 98 box to debian linux.

Which is the preferred Windows manager? GTK?
( I suppose that many will work, but I'll go ahead and ask - hoping to avoid snags)

I have looked though some of the forums but didn't see anything that looked pertinent.
I did look at http://wiki.debian.org/BOINC - it had good advice on installing....


SECOND QUESTION:
should I set up swap space for large projects - like FAAH@home - or just run a small project - like BOINC-Simap??

T H A N K Y O U!!
Jay

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HI,
What is the preferred window manager on Linux for BOINC?
I converted an old Win 98 box to debian linux.

Which is the preferred Windows manager? GTK?
( I suppose that many will work, but I'll go ahead and ask - hoping to avoid snags)

I have looked though some of the forums but didn't see anything that looked pertinent.
I did look at http://wiki.debian.org/BOINC - it had good advice on installing....


SECOND QUESTION:
should I set up swap space for large projects - like FAAH@home - or just run a small project - like BOINC-Simap??

T H A N K Y O U!!
Jay

Which window?

Any should work. Ive used KDE successfully, I know others have used Gnome.

But actually, My favoured answer to your first q is "none". Using Debian, let it install the base system, but don't ask it for anything else when it gives you choices like desktop system, etc.

This advice only applies if you are already OK with creating/editing files from the command line, of course.

I've got my linux boxes all running without any graphics at all, leaving more memory for boinc. To start/stop boinc I use a set of scripts I describe in this thread.

Then I look at them using BoincView from another box. The advantage of BV, if you have a winbox, is that BV will show you all of your clients in one display.

BV only runs from windoze, so if I had a linux-only home, I'd look at it BoincManager running under KDE on another box.

This is why it was inspired of you to combine your two questions, because saving memory means I can run bigger apps without using a swapfile.

My suggestion would be to try to run with minimal swapfile usage, try

cat /proc/meminfo

to see swap usage (and a lot of other stuff).

Right now one of my boxes has got

SwapTotal: 1950440 kB
SwapFree: 1915728 kB

and that is running a CPDN plus a Rosetta together (2 cpus) in only 256M ram, but no GUI. The swap usage is about 35M, as you can see, so the whole thing is using only 291M or thereabouts.

On the other hand, I have a 2G swapfile as I can afford it, the hard drive has plenty of space, and it means my system won't crash if I download a huge app, it just slows down. Personally I prefer graceful degradation to an app crashing.

It also means I can do daft things, like *now* (a bit later) I have 2 Rosetta and 2 CPDN both started, that is 4 tasks all loaded into memory at once. Only two are really running, the other two are paused. I get the following

SwapTotal: 1950440 kB
SwapFree: 1811384 kB


So 139M of swap space is taken up, but that extra 100M is for tasks that are still in (swapped) memory but not really running. (NB - the keep in memory preference for paused tasks *does* still allow the task to be swapped out - as far as that pref setting is concerned being in the swapfile counts as still being in memory)

There is no noticeable perfomance overhead for holding the tasks in the swapfile like that -- much less than losing up to an hours work which both Rosetta and CPDN can do if you don't let them stay in 'memory'.

So my advice is to set a big swap space but then monitor the projects at a time when there is exactly one started task for each cpu - ie nothing shows as 'paused'. If the used swap space in that situation gets to be around the size of RAM, you should probably switch to a smaller memory size project.

But by allowing a swapfile that is much bigger than that, you make it possible to keep tasks in memory when they are paused, making the scheduling of multiple projects run a lot more efficiently.

Unlike windows there is not really a runtime overhead in Linux is having excessive swap space, Linux is very efficient at ignoring what it doesn't need right now. The only cost is the reserved space on the drive.

HTH. Your mileage may vary.
River~~

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Which window?

Any should work. Ive used KDE successfully, I know others have used Gnome.


...... snip/snip.............


HTH. Your mileage may vary.
River~~

T H A N K Y O U !!!!!!

Jay