status: adding Gridcoin wallet to the BILD distro/USB

[Erkan-Yilmaz]

the idea was to add the Gridcoin client to BILD USB

pinging @Peppernrino

mentioned in hangout 7

[Peppernrino]

i think this was brought up before. we might need to look into licensing because since Gridcoin is about money, Linux foundation might not support it... dont know if that's shit, but worth looking into. :)

i was assured gaining root access would be easy, and then it's just aptitude vs. emerge.

[dopeshitnetworks-irc-dopeshit-net]

Wouldn't it be more wide spread and valuable to create a working gentoo package to emerge? Maybe a script for some other things too @Peppernrino . That or Gridcoin needs to contact the #Boinc-It people and ask them to work it in. This would also benefit future people whom use BILD as a daily or backup BOINC system due to Boinc-Italy's BILD team dropping ATI support in the latest build going forward and older BILD builds could also" emerge --sync && emerge install gridcoinresearchd " BAM! The wallet! Maybe we should actually communicate with their dev's? I still have not tried to compile it from source on a BILD machine but should to see if there are any issues. But going future it would just be a Boinc Nvidia capable Live Gridcoin Wallet distro. If we could actually collaborate on projects , instead of " its mine fuck off " we could get a debian or opensuse based linux distro with full gpu support and the Gridcoin wallet , the ability to save WU to a mounted /home/gridcoin directory either USB or HDD , the ability to install the currently running distro on a fat32 drive like when live linux distro's first came out and you could even have a windows icon " Gridcoin Linux " . Rino has a good hold on " what not to include " after working with BILD and digging threw every inch of it. We could really do something good there , as a team..The Team Gridcoin Linux Distro , and the publicity that would attract even it it only made it to www.distrowatch.com and we only had 1 release ever. I have a feeling it could grow into something very useful and truly a value added asset to the whole of BOINC and Gridcoin both. First time users could have a wallet up and running without needing to configure anything.. I know the idea came before me , and the " upper level community members " said it would be to much work maintaining packages let alone supporting the distro itself.

[skcin]

Last year I wrote a script that creates a custom arch linux image. The image can be flashed on a usb drive. It is not a live image like BILD, it is a full installation. Any changes you make or files you download are persistent and won't be deleted at reboot. The script adds the grc client from Tahvoks AUR package and boinc. It also changes the bootloader and background images. I even asked an arch linux dev about licensing stuff and he told me that it was fine as long as we don't call it similar to "arch". So calling it "grcOS" would be fine.

I have not opened the code yet because the script is very rough. If you don't know what you are doing you might overwrite your hdd. But if someone is interested in helping and/or testing I can put it on github.

It would be especially helpful if someone could take a look on how to get the gpu drivers to work properly with boinc since I don't own a gpu.

[Peppernrino]

@skcin, I would be very interested in helping out with that/testing. I have a bunch of GPUs also. :D

I liked the idea of being able to install on the USB stick in the interest of moderate energy savings... this can still be accomplished with what you propose?

My next course of action was going to be to get root on BILD, and try to un/emerge things... but honestly, I understand Arch a bit more. I really don't care how it gets done, just that it does. BILD was just the first thing I found that the GPU drivers just... worked... so I started recommending it for people having problems with Linux+GPU. I've been trying to move away from Windows altogether myself.

I fully agree with @grcjamezz that having something that requires minimal setup would be beneficial to our cause. There's already like 100 steps. ;)

[grctest]

@Peppernrino Any luck getting Gridcoin added?

[dopeshitnetworks-irc-dopeshit-net]

Me and @Peppernrino spoke with sabayonino the creator of B.I.L.D. from the Boinc Italy team and the issue is getting a working package to emerge... I have worked a little bit but need to do more , I was focused more on the ppc64 gnu Linux project but since that is being scrubbed for now or something , I have tried compiling the latest source on the current bild release to no success. There are packages for the dependences , boost , curl , the whole ( i cant remember them ) and its going to take a little time to work out this and that for someone like myself a non coder.. BUT , I will tell you 100% sabayonino and the Team Italy Boinc freenode members have been totally cool with the idea. It would just take our package to be in the default package repo for Sabayon Linux. Now this is to Gentoo what Ubuntu is to Debian.. Sabayon Linux is Gentoo based but uses its own default install packages and BILD is just a live limited and custom version , that is also limited to a thumb drive and cannot be installed to HDD or any device its just a live running instance. I have ran it on my desktop a month AMD 9590's / 32GB / 0 HDD / GTX750ti 2gb and crunching like a champ. My blades all run it , same way loaded into ram. It's stable , but in the latest release he dumped ATI. Older versions you can crunch yoyo@home , newer crap out. Older has Intel support with ATI. There are current limitations that we were able to express our goals as the Gridcoin community , and as long as we have a package that could be installed and is stable it would be acceptable to their repo branch used on BILD. I said there is no reason we couldn't work together , even being on different BOINC teams , maybe we should really work on that GRIDXIT as it would benefit them too! Anyways , marix? Anyways , I can give SSH access to a BILD box if someone doesn't have the time to run/boot/install/vm it. Same with the ppc64 project.. Everything is lan , ran cat6 and 15mbps up 99.97% stable. Could even spin up a dev VM and launch openvz instances of what ever Linux distro Posix or non Posix compliant , OSX is BSD so that could be doing FBSD or OpenBSD too.. This whole idea opens up the whole porting concept.. The main 50 top linux flavors and distro's should have packages for newbs this day in age , having to build deps lep alone apt-get yum slapt-get pkg_add -r pkg_install dpkg install emerge etc deps it should just be the package manager with Gridcoin in the tree! When we hit Gridxit it would really help the amount of newbs with issues , less support. Anyways , yes luck just need to build it.. Bounties for porting? I mean we put foundation funds to other causes.