I heard that Riva Tuner could be made to worked in an XP VM hosted from a Linux system (which could be beneficial for those with multiple GPU's and struggle with cool-bits). All this may now be irrelevant should Matt's Linux system tick a few boxes...

Setting up Coolbits is easy in a console or a script using the nvidia-config utility that ships with NVIDIA drivers for Linux. man nvidia-config for the user manual. I forget the exact command line switches but usually what you want to do is "enable all GPUs" then follow with the "configure coolbits" switch which configures coolbits for all enabled GPUs.

Thing 2 will do that for you.

I've found it's best to use nvidia-config just after a fresh driver install or before the Xorg.conf file has not been heavily edited and modified by the usere. Nvidi-config's parser doesn't seem to be overly intelligent so when user has "customized" too much nvidi-config gets confused. If you delete Xorg.conf (or simply hide it by renaming it to Xorg.conf.bkp or something) then install the driver then run nvidia-config it works perfectly every time and will continue to work perfectly as long as someone doesn't manually edit the file into a format nvidia-config doesn't parse well.

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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

Hi Mikey,
Are you down for a little testing, Mikey? I know you don't need Thing 1 but that makes you the perfect tester... if Thing 1 doesn't work for you you'll have a much better idea of where it's failing than someone who has never burned an ISO to DVD before.

Sure, I have a box I am willing to sacrifice for testing. My main testing box is only a dual core so I hope that is okay, but I could do a quad if I need to. If you need one with a gpu it will have to be the dual core for now. Are you think Nvidia gpu's only, or are you thinking Boinc wide and ATI and Nvidia gpu's will both work. Or is all that too early yet?

How big of a hard drive will I need in the machine, right now I have a 160gb one with over 90gb free in my test box, but I have a small stack of other drives I could add in if needed.

I'm thinking just GPUgrid and NVIDIA for now. If/when I acquire another AMD (I gave the 7990 I bought last year to my nephews), I'll try to code something for AMD and NVIDIA combined. One GPU is sufficient, number of CPUs and disks doesn't matter. When I have something ready I'll post a download link here.

Matt has shown me an easier way to provide a customized Linux "distro" so I might go that route and include Thing 2 in it (after testing Thing 2 of course). It wouldn't be a true distro, just an image (copy) of a Ubuntu installation on one of my machines bundled up into a .img file then converted to an ISO so you can burn it to DVD and install to an HDD. That depends if the .img to ISO converter works or not, heard it does but ya never know.

Sorry for all the direction changes. Everyday I seem to discover a new possibility that has the potential to make it all easier and better. It might look like I'm confused but I'm not, just learning as I go. Well, OK, I guess that's just organised confusion :-)

Also, there's a security issue I didn't think of until now. For Thing 2 to do everything I've promised it's going to need root privilege on your system. If it gets root privilege it can take over your entire computer, steal all your recipe files, reattach your BOINC client to my BOINC projects so I get credits for tasks your machine crunches and possibly even scoop your online banking info (if you do online banking) and send it to me in an email. It could theoretically even invade other machines on your LAN and scoop your banking PIN from them. I doubt I can do that at this time but I could learn how, not that I have any illusion that I could keep it secret or get away with it. The point is... that's the security issue, what are we going to do about it?

Regarding security with scripts, scripts are not compiled code. The script is the source and anybody can open it with a simple text editor, read it and see what it does providing they know the script language. If it's a sufficient security measure for you we could agree that you and all the others who will easy access to the script will be watching and that will be sufficient deterent as long as you never run a script that I send you privately, unless of course you know the scripting language (I usually use Python). If there is a better solution please let me know, anybody. Or I could provide clear and detailed tutorial on how to do the stuff that needs root privilege. So far Thing 2 would need root privilege only to install the NVIDIA driver and setup the Coolbits, IIRC. It's feasible for users to do that manually rather than have the script do it. That way the root password stays secret though I could access any file you can access from your own user account.

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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

Howdo - sorry to hijack the thread. I've made you all a live Linux USB disk. The thread about it is here: http://www.gpugrid.net/forum_thread.php?id=3642

Matt

Some might call that a hijack but I regard it as additional info I can learn from and perhaps use. Thanks. It is a slight topic change so thanks for opening a new thread for it :-)

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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

I get the impression many GPUgrid crunchers would like to try Linux but are turned off by reports from those who have tried and either gave up or failed. What are the stumbling blocks? How could the whole process of installing Linux and BOINC and setting it up to crunch GPUgrid be made easier? Is it simply installing the OS itself? Is it installing BOINC? Is it the NVIDIA drivers? Let's discuss it and see if I and some of the other Linux users here can provide some scripts or packages that automate some of the harder parts.

I experimented a bit with Ubuntu 13.10 on my spare basement machine and eventually gave up & reinstalled win7 on it. Main reasons:

-Hardware issues, wouldn't recognize a 2nd hard drive installed in the machine
-Difficult to successfully network with other windows machines in the house
-graphics drivers (and anything else not available right in the software center) difficult to install
-the OS's reliance on terminal commands to do anything meaningful instead of the gui is arcane, annoying and time consuming

I like the concept of linux since it's open source freeware that is not controlled by microsoft, but the implementation seems like it has quite a ways to go before it is readily usable by regular joes. Personally I had my fill of command prompt/terminal tomfoolery back in the DOS days when I was in junior high and don't have a big desire to go back to it. Windows, with all its problems, is very easy to use these days. Just click on an install file and.. voila.. it installs itself. Until linux can reach that level of user friendliness it will never be mainstream.

If I feel the need to toy with that machine again I will probably try Win XP on it to get rid of the WDDM overhead, instead of linux.

Thanks for your input and sad to hear Ubuntu Linux didn't work for you.

The highest version number is not always the best. The version you tried, 13.x, is an odd numbered version which means it's not stable. You should have tried 12.04 instead.

With 12.04 I haven't had any problem with any of the issues you mentioned. Linux recognizes all the disks and partitions on a system. The reason Windows users think it doesn't is because it doesn't name them and organize them the way Windows does.

Networking with Windows machines in Ubuntu 12.04 is just a couple of mouse clicks away. There is a wizard specifically for that on the app launcher and it's very simple to use. I guess you just didn't find it?

I install lots of software that isn't in the Software Center. If it's a .deb package (most of it is) all you have to do is download it and click on it. NVIDIA drivers install with a click or 2 from the "Additional drivers" app in the app launcher. It doesn't provide the absolutely latest version but it does guarantee a stable version.

My Thing 2 script will provide easy NVIDIA driver updates and roll backs on demand (i.e. when the user wants to not when the OS wants to).

If you give it a while you see that you are not totally reliant on the terminal to do anything useful. You find lots of stuff is handleable by GUIs. Windows users are adverse to using a terminal/console because the Windows shell is extremely difficult and backwards. It's just the opposite in Linux, the shell and therefore console/terminal is very well developed and user friendly.

I think people get the idea Linux is all terminal because in forums, whenever someone asks how to do something in Linux, the response usually involves terminal commands. The reason for that is usually because it's easier to explain that as a solution than to explain which GUI to install and all the clicks needed to get something done. The GUIs are often there if you need them but terminals are often easier and faster.

Hope you find XP's drawbacks less troublesome but if it's an unauthorized version/install I think you'll find it's a PITA. Every OS is a PITA, sometimes, even Linux. Whichever one is least painful for you is the one you want.

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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

The thing is it allows you to set the fan speed but not a target temperature. So you set the fan at say 40% because that speed keeps your card at a nice 70*C then the ambient temperature goes up for whatever reason (your AC quits, the sun rises and shines in the window and heats up the room, your wife catches a chill and cranks the thermostat up, whatever) and suddenly your cards are running at 85*C. What you really need is an app that allows you to set a target temperature, say 70*C, and then automatically adjusts the fan speed to keep the card at that temperature. If the ambient temp goes up the app adjusts the fan speed up to keep the card at the target temp. If the ambient goes down then the app adjusts the fan speed down to conserve a little power, reduce noise and avoid unnecessary wear and tear on the fan.

I think that's what you really want and I happen to have exactly that. I wrote the app myself, it works perfect with 1 fan so far because all I had was 1 fan when I wrote it but I'm sure it could work with several more fans. I have it setup to start when the OS boots though it can also be setup to start by clicking an icon on your desktop or an icon on the Application Launcher (Start Menu in Windows speak).

I completely agree with your analysis of the controlling the fan speed and GPU core temperature and that is something everyone using Linux should have.

You can already do that via the nvidia-settings app that ships with Linux drivers. It's a GUI app, you click an icon to run it. I have used it to control the fan speed on 2 cards and set them at different speeds. I have heard it works with a maximum of 4 cards but others have said the limit is much higher than that. I haven't seen many motherboards with more than 4 slots so 4 should be plenty.

Once again, thank you for your enlightenment and forum postings on controlling the fan speed issue. After doing some research and testing I was finally able to control the fan speed on two video cards in the same system and set them at different speeds. Discovering skgiven's previous postings on this subject was truly the "game changing" event, and I owe him another huge thank you as well for those forum postings.

Every OS is a PITA

No doubt about that.

I also have a radeon card in that machine & have been using it for Einstein - from what I've gathered the AMD drivers are more difficult to deal with than nvidia in Linux? It's also cobbled together out of old parts including the hard drives which probably contribute to the issues I had.

If I put an nvidia card in it at some point I might try it again with a LTS release.

I'm not sure if AMD is harder to deal with in Linux. I've heard stories that say the greatest difficulty is getting AMD and NVIDIA to work side-by-side in Linux. We shall see as I will be receiving an AMD 7770 soon. I'll be putting it in with my 3 NVIDIA cards and will try to get it working.

I would like to release 1 version of Crunchuntu that has drivers for AMD and NVIDIA pre-installed plus all the other features I've mentioned. If I can't make that work then I'll release 2 flavors of Crunchuntu: 1 for AMD and the other for NVIDIA.

An update rfor anybody looking forward to Crunchuntu:

Work on Crunchuntu is progressing, perhaps slowly, but it is progressing. The biggest problem I face is building the GUI. If it were not for the GUI it would be mostly done but I'm not as experienced with GUIs as I am with CLI apps. The latter are much easier but I said I would try to make it all GUI so that's what I'll try to do.

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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

An update rfor anybody looking forward to Crunchuntu:

Work on Crunchuntu is progressing, perhaps slowly, but it is progressing. The biggest problem I face is building the GUI. If it were not for the GUI it would be mostly done but I'm not as experienced with GUIs as I am with CLI apps. The latter are much easier but I said I would try to make it all GUI so that's what I'll try to do.

And those of us waiting REALLY DO appreciate your work on this!!

I had a pc keep quitting on me the other day and after replacing the hard drive and the cpu fan figure out the fan wasn't any good and it was just overheating! I HEARD the drive clicking so it could have been bad too, but it set aside in the maybe pile. I replaced the cpu fan with a Hyper 212+ setup and the system is now crunching again just fine. Along the way after I put the new cpu fan in I installed 64bit Windows Home Server but couldn't get an anti-virus to load! Most free ones don't work on Servers!! Eventually I gave up and replaced the hard drive, again, and installed Win7 on it and it is now crunching. It has an AMD gpu in it so I did not even try the Linux route, been there done that no joy in gpu crunching land for me that way!!

One of my older pc's running Windows XP has had several secondary harddrives in it over the years, it currently has an Nvidia gpu in it but has had various AMD gpu's in it. The AMD software won't uninstall as the 'drive is no longer found' with the software on it. BUT when I put an AMD gpu in the machine it works just fine. What I am getting at is I have no problems clicking thru an error message saying this or that kind of gpu was not found if you can get both kinds of drivers to install in your 'Crunchuntu'. If you need to do two different versions that works for me too. Linux is very flexible when the underlying hardware changes when moving harddrives from one machine to another.

I've been using Linux for two years and crunching on linux notebooks for three months. North bridge of my old notebook was getting very hot while running bot CPU and GPU works. So I ran only CPU works.
Now, I have a fairly new notebook. It crunchs all the projects well but GPUgrid CUDA works causes the GPU temps to reach 95 degrees while running with full CPU load. Einstein@home was able to reach only 80 degrees. So I run only GPUgrid GPU works on this now. This way GPU temps doesn't reach above 90degs.
Problem with Linux was Optimus support of Nvidia. But I was able to run Boinc with optirun boinc command and running fine now. However, I have broken the OpenCL support someway.

I'm not sure if AMD is harder to deal with in Linux. I've heard stories that say the greatest difficulty is getting AMD and NVIDIA to work side-by-side in Linux.

With recent-ish drivers, PhysX no longer works for NVidia GPU's if there is an AMD/ATI GPU installed.

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FAQ's

HOW TO:
- Opt out of Beta Tests
- Ask for Help

Does anyone have an opinion on Mint Debian? That is, would it be easier/harder to set up with BOINC?
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2577

How about driver updates, as compared to Mint Ubuntu for example?
Does 32/64 bit matter for GPUGrid purposes?

It's essential that you use a 64bit Linux operating system; the Linux app is x64 only. OS flavour is down to you.

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FAQ's

HOW TO:
- Opt out of Beta Tests
- Ask for Help

It's essential that you use a 64bit Linux operating system; the Linux app is x64 only. OS flavour is down to you.

Hmmm well that leaves out my older machines then, I did not know that, thanks! You just saved me some work on switching to Linux for crunching here for my old XP machines.

Hi Dagorath, if you are working on the issue of the Linux installer, I recommend you try the new Linux kernel version in its Low Latency.

Kernel: Linux-031307-lowlatency 3.13.7 (x86_64)
Compiled: 201403240156 SMP PREEMPT Mon Mar 24 6:05:35 UTC 2014

The overall performance is very good, GPUGRID Boinc tasks or generally not significantly reduce the execution time but the whole system faster wheel fine.

Low Latency Kernel love. Greetings.

Hi Dagorath, if you are working on the issue of the Linux installer, I recommend you try the new Linux kernel version in its Low Latency.

Kernel: Linux-031307-lowlatency 3.13.7 (x86_64)
Compiled: 201403240156 SMP PREEMPT Mon Mar 24 6:05:35 UTC 2014

The overall performance is very good, GPUGRID Boinc tasks or generally not significantly reduce the execution time but the whole system faster wheel fine.

Low Latency Kernel love. Greetings.

Dagorath quit crunching so I think he stopped working on his Linux based release.

Dagorath quit crunching so I think he stopped working on his Linux based release.

Hi Mikey: Thanks for the comment, I'm sorry to say, the truth is that it was a difficult task, Linux does not help matters.

Anyway the comment is valid in general Low Latency Kernel is proving very interesting and personally recommend their use (always under the responsibility of each). Greetings.