Suggestion for 8th post in the sticky:
How to use a Linux CD to crunch without a hard drive.
Overclockix is a customized version of Knoppix 3.2- a bootable Linux CD-based OS, and does not require you to have a hard drive, nor does it write to a hard drive if you don't want it to.
It can help you get your spare parts crunching, build cheap diskless clusters, or just function as a temporary fix for a damaged OS or hard drive. It runs entirely off the CD and crunches in a ramdisk.
There are really only three steps to get it up and running.
1) Get an Overclockix CD or several.
2) Get the machine(s) booted from the Overclockix CD(s).
3) Run a couple of commands to start and configure the seti client(s).
Step 1:
Getting an Overclockix CD
Download the 691mb iso and burn the image onto a 700mb CD-R. It may help if you use a web-browser that can resume broken downloads (opera) or things like get-right or download accelerator to avoid hassles downloading such a large file. You can also email a request for a CD to
[email protected], and I'll make arrangements to mail one out to you for the cost of shipping. Here's the link to download it:
http://folding.octeams.com/oclinux/Overclocki_ColdFusion.iso
To burn the iso, I suggest Nero- Close the wizards, go to the File dropdown menu, choose the "burn image" option. Winiso will also work. What's important is that you don't simply copy the iso onto a CD, but burn the iso image. The roxio software that's built-in to WinXP won't do it.
Step 2:
Booting the CD
Set your bios to boot from CD. Most hardware will be detected and configured automagically and you'll be on the desktop in about a minute. Its possible that you may have some difficulty depending on what your hardware is, and I can't possibly account for and address each and every scenario in this post. But there are cheatcodes that can help. Press F2 when prompted if you want to see some common cheatcodes. You can read up on knoppix cheatcodes on
www.knoppix.net/docs or seek help in the
www.knoppix.net forums. There are also threads in the OC forums about Overclockix where you can ask questions and get assistance.
knoppix screen=1024x768 (for example is a cheatcode to set the screen resolution to 1024x768) I beleive the default resolution is 640x480, so this cheatcode should probably be used by just about everyone. You can of course use other common resolutions.
knoppix 2 (for example boots into text-mode)
To crunch:
Open a terminal. It's the taskbar icon of a monitor with a shell next to it on the bottom left of the screen. You will get a semi-transperant window of what looks like a DOS prompt.
Run these commands:
foldoff
cfgseti
You will then see the seti console's config menu and be able to enter your user information- email addy, setiathome username.... The seti client will then shutdown and restart in stealth mode after about 40 seconds, leaving you a blank prompt in the terminal. Don't worry, it's crunching.
Once you've set the user configuration by running
cfgseti, there are some other commands you can try-
setioff (will shut down the seti client)
setionproxy IP_ADDY
ort (will start the client and run the proxy option using the IP and port you specify)
Use the commands
top or
gkrellm to check CPU useage and verify that setiathhome is running. Pressing "q" will quit top, which is a task manager. You can also click the karamba icon on the desktop which will show CPU and memory useage.
Overclockix works best on moderately new hardware. I suggest a minimum of 400mhz CPU and also 128mb of ram if you want to run it in graphical mode. You can get away with much less if you run in text-mode using the cheatcode
knoppix 2. Not all hardware is supported (mainly modems or very old video cards are problematic).
There are also many cool things you can do with this OS in order to personalize it, or monitor your seti client from another machine on your network. You can even set it up to crunch seti wu's onto a hard drive or usb pen drive in order to avoid the loss of a WU due to reboot or shutdown (a simple procedure called creating a persistent home directory).
It's packed with nearly 2000 common linux applications, and 6 different burn-in apps/DC clients: prime95, memtest86, cpuburn, F@H, S@H, and Lucifer. It even has a windows virus scanner that updates its definitions and installs itself to the ramdisk when you run it, so you can scan hdd partitions for virii without booting into windows.
getantivirus and
virusscan are the commands to install and use the virus scanner. So it can be also useful to burn-in machines or do sytem recovery.
While it only takes a few minutes to get it booted and crunching, and I have attempted to make it easy to use by writing scripts and providing instructions in a folder on Overclockix's desktop... learning to use
everything included on the CD could take some time. I encourage you to play around with it as much or as little as you like. It does have web-browsers and chat clients- in fact I wrote this post while booted from an Overclockix CD.
