Experiment: What's the minimal install to get nVidia BOINC crunching

[frontier204]

I just wanted to share my experience getting BOINC GPU to work on a "headless" Ubuntu Server 12.10 install, which I'm using as a NAS that now sucks 250-300W from the wall due to the crunching . Note what I have is not quite headless in that there's a TV that I don't use hooked to the GPU, but I suppose you could do the same stuffing some resistors in a DVI-VGA adaptor.

Note it would have been a lot more practical for me to do this by installing a lightweight GUI (xubuntu, lubuntu) that I wouldn't use and putting the server stuff that I needed, but here it is anyway for your amusement.
Who knows - maybe this will be useful for all of you running Ubuntu Server for SMP folding when they finally support GPU OpenCL folding.

The required installs are the following:

BOINC / CUDA: Currently there's a bug in the boinc-client that asks for WAY too many packages to actually get it running, hence the no-install-recommends flag.

apt-get --no-install-recommends install boinc-client boinc-nvidia-cuda

I set up BOINC for remote access from my Windows rig as per: Controlling BOINC remotely - BOINC

nVidia Driver: Ubuntu doesn't come with a CUDA-capable driver, so install one that works for you, like this one...

apt-get install nvidia-current-updates

Minimal GUI: To get BOINC to recognize that you have a GPU, BOINC has to be loaded AFTER some sort of graphical user interface (GUI) is up and running. For this, I used a simple display manager:
Code:

apt-get install --no-install-recommends lightdm
apt-get install lightdm-webkit-greeter

After restarting, the result was an ugly, unusable GUI, but it was enough GUI to load the nVidia driver and get BOINC folding.

2012-12-16 7:26:25 PM |  | NVIDIA GPU 0: GeForce GTX 550 Ti (driver version unknown, CUDA version 5.0, compute capability 2.1, 134214656MB, 134214622MB available, 745 GFLOPS peak)
2012-12-16 7:26:25 PM |  | OpenCL: NVIDIA GPU 0: GeForce GTX 550 Ti (driver version 304.51, device version OpenCL 1.1 CUDA, 1024MB, 134214622MB available)

Have fun!