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Installing FCI on Ubuntu Edgy

Introduction

This document is my notes on how to install the program Folding@Home Client Info (FCI) on Ubuntu Edgy. FCI was written by Bas Couwenberg, and is available here:
Folding@Home Client Info
We will be using the release fci-0.12.1.

This howto is only describing the installation of the FCI client, not the server.

Download the program

First, download the program by either clicking on the link above, or by executing the following command while in your home directory:


wget http://fci.bile.nl/downloads/fci-0.12.1.tar.gz

Next, we will run the following command to uncompress and untar the download:


tar -xzvf fci-0.12.1.tar.gz

Change into the newly created directory with the following command:


cd fci-0.12.1

Satisfy the dependencies

We now will satisfy the dependencies. We do that by running the following commands:


sudo apt-get update


sudo apt-get upgrade


sudo apt-get install libwww-perl libgetopt-mixed-perl

Configure the client software

Now, you should know the FULL PATH to where you have your Folding@Home executable program. On my system, that program's name is FahCore_78.exe. Yours is most likely named the same. The FULL PATH to that directory is what we will call folding_dir.

For example, on my system, my 'folding_dir' is:
/home/rob/Fold
Find out what your folding_dir is now, and make a note of it.

Next, we will copy all of the files in the 'client' directory to your 'folding_dir' directory. Do that with the following command (where you will substitute the proper path for 'folding_dir'):


cp /client/* folding_dir

Next, we must edit the file 'fci-client.pl' so that it will work. The script 'fci-client.pl' is in the 'client' directory, so change to that directory now with the command:


cd client

Now, open up the file fci-client.pl with your favorite text editor and make the following changes:

Change the following line:

                 url             => 'http://example.com/index.pl',

So that the text on the right hand side is the url of the server that you are using. If you are using my server, simply put in the value:

http://linuxmissle.com/folding/index.pl

so that it will then look like this:

                 url 		=> 'http://linuxmissle.com/folding/index.pl',

Next, change the line that looks like this:

		folding_dir	=> '/home/folding',

So that the correct value for the folding_dir is in there instead of '/home/folding'.

Next, we will copy the fci-client.pl script to our $PATH. We do that with the following command:


sudo cp client/fci-client.pl /usr/local/bin/fci-client.pl

Test the Program

Finally, we will test the program by executing the command:


fci-client.pl --verbose

After you execute that command, look at the web site which is made by the fci server software to be sure that your client really did work. Also, check for any errors in the output of the command above.

Running the client with a cron job

Finally, if you have confirmed that the fci-client.pl is properly configured, you will then run it by a cron job, so that it will run "automatically" every so often.

In order to have the cron daemon run the client every half hour, do the following:

Execute the command:


crontab -e

Now, you will hit the "i" key to put yourself into "insert" mode. After you do that, you will type in the following line. The big spaces that you see there come from hitting the Tab key, not from hitting the space bar several times. That is important. Also, at the very end of the line, you must hit the "Enter" key, and go to the next line, even though you will not type anything else. That is because the line that we are going to type in MUST end with a newline character.

So, type the following line in:

*/30	*	*	*	* 	fci-client.pl

Then, you will type in the following:

:wq

And hit the "Enter" key.