Skinning BOINC on Linux

During a recent trip to the Museum of Science in Boston I was reminded that I used to participate in Seti@home when i was a Windows user and I wanted to start participating again. It turns out it’s easy to do thanks to BOINC, and it’s already in the Ubuntu universe repository (you will need both boinc-manager and boinc-client), although Ubuntu’s repo doesn’t have the current version. Plus the version from the BOINC website (which is just a simple script you don’t even need to run as root) opens web pages in Firefox, not Evolution as the version the Ubuntu repos uses for some odd reason.

The one real problem that I found is that I tried to install some new skins and the instructions provided are only for Windows users. Luckily I found a post in the BOINC forums that had the information I needed. Of course once I switched to the version of BOINC that I download from their website (that simple little script I mentioned) I just had to create a skins subdirectory under /home/<myusername>/BOINC and deposit the skin folders there.

My only problem was with the Pulsar skin, which simply refused to launch for some odd reason. Once I launched BOINC from the Terminal I saw that the skin used a “Graphics” subdirectory rather than the “graphics” that the skin file specified. Once I renamed the folder (and changed the capitalization on some files since Linux is case sensitive, unlike Windows) I was able to use the Pulsar skin. I may stick with the Space Skin, though. Either way I wish I could figure out why the Graphics Available link doesn’t do anything for me.