Hacker News Reader

Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

Gotta say the instructions are pretty awfully lacking. You go to the download page and you download the client and there's nothing that tells you what you're supposed to do after you download the client.

I'm on Ubuntu 18.04 and after downloading the client I had to do:

    $ sudo update-rc.d FAHClient defaults
    $ sudo dpkg -i ~/Downloads/fahclient_7.5.1_amd64.deb
    $ sudo /etc/init.d/FAHClient start

Yeah, it only took a few minutes of googling, but why not put that info on the download page?

I edited /etc/fahclient/config.xml so that gpu v = 'true', but It doesn't seem to be using the NVIDIA GPU after restarting the client. Any hints?

View on HN

This is a great example of something that happens when a technology/program/framework has a long history and an existing community. Most users have been there for a very long time and sometimes the instructions or documentation doesn't explain what new users may or may not know.

I see this a lot in the nodejs tooling, Azure, vmware. Each version of a product slowly changes the way the product works and most documentation, readme and blog posts miss key information that they assume people would already know. If I'm new to node, I may not know things. It's like when you have some sample C# code and it doesn't include the "using" line and/or the Nuget package used - assuming the person already knows what package would perform this task - because it's "obvious" to existing users.

Also tried BOINC and got "cannot connect to core server" and apparently (based on googling around) you've gotta open up a specific port. Would be nice if they told you this on the download page or at least where to look after you download.

I gave up on both folding@home and BOINC. I don't have all day to fiddle around with this shit.

Good post, good insights. I faced the same when starting on nodejs stuff, things that were obvious to others were completely lost/hard to find for me.

I got the GPU working with this config:

    <config>
      <!-- Client Control -->
      <fold-anon v='true'/>
    
      <!-- Folding Slot Configuration -->
      <gpu v='true'/>
    
      <!-- Slot Control -->
      <power v='full'/>
    
      <!-- Folding Slots -->
      <slot id='0' type='CPU'/>
      <slot id='1' type='GPU'/>
    </config>

Followed up with

    $ sudo /etd/init.d/FAHClient restart

Like others mentioned, I really want a way to make it specifically work on Covid related proteins.

Ah, that's better, at least I see the GPU showing up now, but I don't see any progress on it.

Also, yes, it doesn't seem to be working on the covid problem, it says it's working on: Project 14311

Halorubrum lacusprofundi

Seems you have to have the opencl libaries installed.

sudo apt install ocl-icd-opencl-dev

Then edit the config file to include gpu (I also added a gpu slot <slot id='1' type='GPU'/> but not sure if it's needed.

Then restart.

Seems you'll have to wait a while to get a job though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com