Poll: Stand-alone client for your OS? Yes/no/unsure

[GreyWhiskers]

I voted "yes" to encourage a stand-alone console client for the Android mobile platform. I believe that one would also be good for iOS (although I don't have a horse in THAT race).

With the ubiquity of pads, both on the Apple iOS platform and the Android platform, it would be useful. I bought a couple of months ago a Kindle Fire (for reading books), butfound that this unit is a full Android App platform as well. At home, it is on pretty much all the time. It would be good to be able to call up the Console client from this.

[edit] Of course, I am talking about only the console on the mobile, to manage the folding farm I have running on various Windows platforms, and that many others have running on OSx, flavours of Linux, etc.

[bruce]

It's unlikely that FAH will be developed for any battery powered device. I know I'm over-generalizing here so there may be exceptions, but ...

First, most mobile devices depend on being idle most of the time to give you all-day access to an overnight charge. FAH would shorten a 4 or 7 or 11 hour daily battery life to an hour or two.
Second, most CPUs in mobile devices are good at integer arithmetic and string/bit manipulation but finding a device that has a powerful floating point capability is probably impossible.

I could envision a mobile app somewhat like FAHControl which could "call home" and tell you the status of your home computer but it would have to depend on the work being done at home. I can't promise that such an App would be developed -- only that it COULD be. As you said in your edit, it wouldn't increase the number of WUs processed so the Pande Group probably wouldn't develop it but somebody will Android or Java skills could port FAHControl to tablets.

[PinHead]

Experts capable of running a console only client are also quite capable of dealing with such things.
PG has limited resources. We don't want them wasting a lot of time to make or support separate clients for a very small number of old-school die-hards.

To pay the bills, I work on systems in California, Houston, India, United Kingdom and other cities and countries. On not a one of those servers do I have a GUI. I sit in Canton, Ga.

Guess I am old school die hard, but I really enjoy that check.

[earthsaver]

I would like an easy way to intentionally install a console version of FAH v.7 without negotiating the command line on my Mac. I would also like to be able to monitor the client running locally as well as clients running elsewhere on the Internet to whose shared volumes are connected to my Mac. InCrease did all of this beautifully, even if I did occasionally have to manually download the FAH core files.

Finally, I'd like my folding and monitoring not to be interrupted for long when I transition these four or five clients to v.7.

[bruce]

I'm not a Mac person and I've never used Increase . . . but I don't understand what you mean about a Console version that doesn't use the command line. The V7 software does not have any text-based question and answer prompting. Increase is a 3rd party tool (not written by Stanford). Perhaps the author of Increase can adapt it to use the telnet interface.

As far as transitioning from V6 to V7, once the V7 client reaches a level of maturity that you're ready to use it, you can transition as you see fit. V6 and V7 are totally independent of one another. You can coordinate the start of a WU on V7 whenever V6 finishes its current WU. If you happen to run both at the same time, naturally they'll compete with each other for resources and both will run slower, but there's no other conflict.

[Ravage7779]

If you pick apart the mac installer, you can run the console version of v7 right now. Throw all the pieces into a folder anywhere you please, and run it from the command line just like v6. Have to write your config file from scratch tho which sucks...no prompting for all the values like v6 did. Have to go dig thru the linux instructions on the website for all the values you need to enter. Nothing like going backwards. If there was a script you could run that would prompt for those values and generate a config file, that would be something...but there has been zip since January, so don't hold your breath for anything. Running the console version tho means you have to deal with the command line, kinda the idea there... Your requests for monitoring v7 anywhere you have a client running is what the gui is supposed to do, but gtk (the graphics library that the gui uses) is so horribly broken on 10.7+, that the gui is useless. Again, zip for development since January, blah blah blah...

Stick with v6, less hassle, it's stable, and increase works with it. Just pray that 171.64.65.54 doesn't die for good one of these days.

[Joe_H]

I can't find the post where it was announced, but the FAHClient only downloads for all OS's are now available here - https://fah-web.stanford.edu/projects/F ... llReleases. This is linked off the V7 Beta Download page - https://fah-web.stanford.edu/projects/F ... etaRelease. No need to pick apart the Mac installer anymore.