Folding Forum

How do I install folding@home on a headless Debian box? When I followed the instructions, I realized it was trying to use a display. I know you used to be able to a console-only version. Does this still exist? On another note, my GPU's show that they've made progress on my WIndows box and they are at 100% load, whereas my CPU (Phenom II X4 965) shows 0% progress even though the load is at 100%. There's no errors, but it's strange how my CPU has made no progress whereas my GPU's have made a lot more, and they were started at the same time

Welcome to foldingforum.org, jbenamy.

Yes, it certainly does. When you download the V7 client, it consists of three distinct pieces, called fahclient, fahcontrol, and fahviewer. First, pay attention to fahclient. It is, in fact, the console-only version you're looking for. It can be run in any tty or a console window or even completely in the background. All options are managed by data in config.xml. There are a limited number of command-line parameters but you'll probably ignore them as they really aren't necessary.

The other program of interest is fahcontrol. It is a GUI front-end which reports progress and which can manage any of the options. In a "typical" installation, you'll run both fahclient and fahcontrol and they will communicate through 127.0.0.1 on port 36330. With a "typical" system plus a headless system, the same copy of fahcontrol will communicate with both a local copy of fahclient and a second copy of fahclient running on the headless system through your network.

I recommend you start with one of each, running on the same local system. Once it's up and running, adding a second copy of fahclient on the headless system will be relatively straightforward (though it's not recommended without a moderate amount of Linux networking experience). A separate remote-console application is not required.