Newbie needs Linux help!!!!!!!!!

Did you do the Linux installation or did someone do it for you?

Are you comfortable with issuing shell commands?

Do you know how to edit text files in Linux?

What GUI (if any) are you using?

When you say you have downloaded E@H, what exactly did you download?

Your first step is really to download BOINC and put the shell script that you get into your home directory which should be something like /home/keshet/ (or whatever user name you have chosen).

If you answer these questions, I'll give you a simple list of steps to follow to complete the installation.

Instructions to set up BOINC as a system daemon.

Instructions to set BOINC up to run out of your home directory.

OK, here are my suggestions.

BOINC doesn't need to be installed or run by a privileged account so don't install or run it as root.

From what you describe, if the downloaded shell script was fed to bash, there will be a directory created whose name is ~/downloads/BOINC - you downloaded BOINC and not E@H. Unless you want to test beta apps or power user apps you shouldn't download anything from E@H as BOINC will get the correct files for you when you launch it and use it to attach to the Einstein project.

You could leave ~/downloads/BOINC where it is if you wish but on the assumption that ~/downloads is meant to be a storage area for downloaded files, I would be inclined to shift it to somewhere more appropriate. To me, ~/BOINC seems entirely appropriate. The best thing to do would be simply to remove the ~/downloads/BOINC directory and all its contents and then put a copy of the shell script into your home directory ~ (on the assumption that this home directory belongs to an unprivileged user - NOT root).

Don't use firefox to execute things, launch something like an xterm or other terminal session so that you have a shell prompt that you can interact with. I'm relatively new to Linux but not new to unix. I've used BSD style unixes for close to 30 years. For the last few years I've been mainly using Windows and recently I decided to run Linux on quite a number of crunching boxes so I chose PCLinuxOS which comes with KDE. For things that need a command prompt, I just fire up an xterm whenever needed. A Windows user would probably feel more at home with Konsole which does a pretty good job of looking exactly like a DOS command prompt.

If you put the shell script boinc_ubuntu_5.10.45_i686-pc-linux-gnu.sh into ~ and open an xterm there, you can simply pass the script to the shell by issuing the command
sh boinc_ubuntu_5.10.45_i686-pc-linux-gnu.sh
and the script will execute and unpack all the files into a BOINC directory that it creates. That's the end of installation. Just check that the created BOINC directory is NOT root owned and that all the contents have the appropriate ownership and rwx permissions. That should be automatic but check just in case. With all the files expanded, you can simply delete the shell script that contained them. Also I throw away three files from the BOINC directory that are not needed, binstall.sh, run_client, run_manager. It's much better to start BOINC as a daemon rather than using BOINC Manager and therefore having to keep the manager running all the time. Just fire up the manager whenever you want to look at things and close it when you are finished. BOINC will always be running in the background without the manager having to be running also.

It is desirable to have BOINC launch automatically when you boot your computer and it's also desirable to be able to stop and start BOINC whenever you like with a single click. To do this you need to create three simple shell scripts. One of these is to launch BOINC when your machine boots. During the boot process, a lot of things get started through init scripts. On the Linux I use, there is a file /etc/rc.d/rc.local which is basically a stub for adding local initialization stuff where you don't want to do the full Sys V style init stuff. So I simply added the following code to that rc.local file

if [ -x /home/gary/BOINC/boinc ]
then
    echo "Starting BOINC in 20 seconds ...."
    ( cd /home/gary/BOINC; sleep 20; sudo -u gary ./boinc --daemon ) &
fi

On some of my slower machines I found that BOINC could be running before the network had settled so it would be complaining about not having a default connection. The 20 second delay in the above script solved all that. All you need to do is tweak the username and BOINC directory to suit. You can see that sudo is being used to start BOINC as a non-priveleged user.

To stop and start BOINC any time you like, the following two separate scripts are useful. You can cut and paste these and put them into your ~/Desktop directory so that they will be accessible as icons on your desktop. Change the BOINC directory to suit.

#!/bin/sh
# StartBoinc.sh
# Start BOINC as a daemon

if [ -x /home/gary/BOINC/boinc ]
then
( cd /home/gary/BOINC; ./boinc --daemon ) &
fi

#!/bin/sh
# StopBoinc.sh
# Stop the BOINC daemon

cd /home/gary/BOINC
./boinc_cmd --quit

Also, if you put a link (shortcut) to BOINC Manager into your ~/Desktop directory, you can also start BOINC Manager any time you want by clicking the icon. I'm talking about KDE functionality here but I assume there will be something similar under Gnome - I've never even tried Gnome so I don't know.

Under KDE there is Kwrite which looks and behaves like Notepad. There should be something similar under Gnome. Occasionally you may need to tweak BOINC files like client_state.xml so an editor similar to Notepad is desirable.

Have a good read through the above and let me know if anything is unclear or looks odd to you.