Easy Linux Folding Setup Guide: The GUI Method

For those folding participants new to Linux, the CLI (command line interface) can be a bit unfamiliar. And yea, we’ve all had the frustration of getting the necessary tips from the more experienced Linux users. Yet the developers of most Linux distributions have provided a very nice Graphical User Interface for people who well, live in a graphical world! That’s what we are going to take advantage of, just basically 10 quick & easy graphical steps represented in a series of screenshots. Please note that there are always other ways to accomplish the same result, and that the GUI method can be accompanied by the CLI way at any and all steps along the way.

First thing we do is navigate to Stanford’s download page: http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download
Choose the Linux client(Linux (x86) and BSD *combined uniprocessor and SMP client* (64-bit build) 6.24beta )

Step-1: Left clicking the Penguin icon will open a download window:

Step-2: Download to desktop(or your choice of directory)

Step-3: Right click on the .tar archive and in the dropdown choose > Properties

Step-4: Go to the Permissions tab and make Readable, Writable & Executable as shown in the example. [Editor’s Note: While this step works, it is not necessary and goes against security best practices. When downloaded, the archive will have sufficient permissions for the user to extract. –splat]

Step-5: You can now right-click and choose “extract here”, the uncompressed file will appear separately from the .tgz archive.

Step-6: For simplicity(just my preference) you can rename the folder to something more concise, by right-clicking and choose “Rename”:

Step-7: As shown, the “FAH6.24beta-Linux” folder has been renamed and is less likely to be prone to ‘typos’ if entering the directory manually in the console.

By the way, as you may have suspected, I am leading you through steps that I take, as someone who is “keyboarding challanged”(yep, I’m horrible). Anyway, from this perspective we go to:

Step-8: For quick & easy(or just lazy-like me) open the folding file and highlight & copy the directory “/home/hrsetrdr/Desktop/fah”

Step-9: Open the console, and type “cd” then right-click~paste the “/home/hrsetrdr/Desktop/fah” (without the “ “) into the line, with a space after the “cd”. Hit Enter.

Step-10: Now type the following: “./fah6 -smp 8 -bigadv -config” then hit Enter. You then will be prompted to enter your username, team number(32), passkey plus the other options needed to configure the client. In this example “-bigadv” was added for the “bigadv” work units that run on 8 or more physical/hyperthreading cores. If using the bigadv flag you’ll need to choose “big” for your download option. The arguments of course will be dependent on your hardware and choice of SMP client.

So there you have it, just a basic Ten quick & easy steps to set up & start an SMP Folding client in Linux- the GUI method.

–ihrsetrdr