On Thu, 2012-06-07 at 19:31 -0500, patrick.melo wrote: > The BOINC project has a screensaver that runs on Windows. I installed > BOINC in a virtual machine running Windows XP (32 bit) and copied > boinc.scr from the C:\Windows directory onto my 64 bit F13 system. > When I run the screensaver I get an error. Any feedback is > appreciated. I can run glxgears without any problem. > I think you'll find that BOINC is designed to be a screensaver under Windows because that's about the only way it can get as much CPU time as it needs without interfering with your other work. The native Linux version does a rather better job: it runs 24/7 as a 'niced' background task and so can sop up every bit of unused CPU that is available without having any detectable effect of your own work. It can even run more than one project simultaneously without interfering with what you are doing. I ran SETI@home and MalariaControl together on a fairly small box (866MHz P3, 512MB RAM) without any problems: every few weeks I'd peek to see if it was still running: it always was. However, there is one caveat: if you're doing it just to use up idle cycles its fine on an older box with fixed CPU speeds because the power consumption and CPU speeds don't change with the system workload. However, on a modern variable speed box BOINC will spin the CPUs up to max speed and burn through a lot of power that you wouldn't be paying for if you weren't running it. I recently replaced the P3 with a dual core Athlon system which was well-behaved and ramped up and down nicely during Linux install and configuration. That is, until I fired up BOINC. That's when all fans spun up to max speed and the machine sat there howling and blasting hot air out its vents. I stood the noise for a day and then dumped BOINC. Martin
