Folding Forum

For those folding long stretches at a time,
Would you recommend disabling X11 for folding on Linux, using following code below? Or are there stability or other issues related to running FahClient from a terminal?

Also, is there a sort of text based alternative to FAHControl, which one can run from the terminal to see about all progress that one sees in the GUI client of FAHControl?

Welcome to the folding support forum.

I see no real advantage to disabling X11, and I believe you need it active to do GPU folding.

As for a text based alternative to FAHControl, none that I know of. You can run FAHClient from the command line instead of using the default method which installs it to run in the background like a daemon. Haven't done so myself, so do not know what gets displayed in this mode. It is considered an expert mode of running the client, about the only documentation were a page or two in the old development wiki, and the output from running 'FAHClient --help' at a command line.

Running FAHClient from outside of init, will allow you to only fold on CPU.
I guess it's a current limitation of the client.

You'll see very similar text appear in TTY as would be in the FAHControl log window, but in real time.

FAHClient displays a lot of text over time.

FAH can be run on a server distro where the only terminal support if for text-based connections. Although it's often a challenge to get it installed and configured through the telnet API and you've opened up the direct connection to port 33630, it will run just fine. Isn't that what you're trying to achieve?

Perhaps I'd just like to see FAHControl getting headless linux support.

MeeLee wrote:Perhaps I'd just like to see FAHControl getting headless linux support.

I'm not sure what you mean. FAHControl is simply a user-friendly GUI based way of talking to FAHClient. FAHClient's API is man-readable ... you just have to learn to use it -- or somebody could rewrite it with text-based (headless) menu choices, using the same API. I believe the source is available.

I tried that about 10 years ago on a Core2Quad and found no extra performance with the headless Ubuntu install on cpu only work units......IF you build your desktop environment with as few databases, indexers, servers and other assorted crap as possible consistent with what else you want to do with that computer.

KDE (akonadi etc) Gnome ( Phonon, zeitgeist) PHP servers, sql anything, PDF (evince), Music (jackd, timidity and many, many others). At that time many of those applications on a GUI install would slow up a 3ghz Core2Quad by 1-4% combined. On a modern computer running cpu only? I dunno, but I still avoid them even now.

I believe Joe_H is correct, you need a x-server to fold on a gpu, but not dead sure. Please, run the experiment and report back. Install a headless system, average the production over 3 days or so then dban the hard drive and install a desktop environment using the exact same kernel, see what happens. Good Luck.