The Scottish Boinc Team

I'm running 2 machines using Ubuntu 64 and 32, how do you run them without the GUI, and would they crunch faster?

I am curious about this also but never got round to investigating it.

Like the convenience of the GUI so decided to stick with it.

Although if non-GUI ran faster I might convert.

Buried in this thread is an observation by JavaJoe that he got an extra 30% 8) using the command line.

I never got round to trying it myself & don't know how to go about it. Let's hear from the Gurus!

HGOC >> On

I ran Ubuntu Server for a couple of weeks on a E4300 and found no appreciable difference to the performance of the Gnome GUI. The Boinc benchmarks were much higher, but I found that the crunching speed was pretty much identical.

If you run a GUI, open a command prompt and run top, without anything running you should only see 1 or 2% CPU usage. Execute the same from runlevel 3 and you should get pretty much the same.

For a lower spec machine the difference may be higher as the GUI will take memory and Disk I/O bandwidth that could otherwise be used for data. However for a decent box I doubt you will see much difference on idenitcal hardware.

Some people are just more happy running from the command line, so it's horses for courses in my book.

HGOC >> Off


HGO is a through back to my youth = Hipocritical Get-Out Clause. In other words, the above comes with a 60 second warranty. YMMV

Did Joe ever post his "Short How To"

I'm running 2 machines using Ubuntu 64 and 32, how do you run them without the GUI, and would they crunch faster?

In Linux this is usually controlled by the file /etc/inittab
In there you should see this sort of thing at the top
# Default runlevel. The runlevels used by RHS are:
# 0 - halt (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
# 1 - Single user mode
# 2 - Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you do not have networking)
# 3 - Full multiuser mode
# 4 - unused
# 5 - X11
# 6 - reboot (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
#
id:5:initdefault:

The lines beginning with a # are comments and its that id line that controls GUI or not GUI.
In the above its set to 5 (X11 or GUI)
if you change it to 3 (full multiuser mode) and reboot you'll lose the GUI and just have a text based login.

As others have said, you'll save very little CPU by doing this

UBUNTU seems to have stopped taking updates.

When you click on install, the cursor just stays a the circle, no admin password prompt.

Any Ideas??????

I managed to do a couple of updates this morning on two machines and yesterday come to think of it. What version of Ubuntu are you using?

I'm using 8.04, I have 2 machines with the problem, a 64bit and a 32bit, I installed the os on another machine yesterday, and have no problem with that one as yet.

Think I got it :-

sudo update-manager -d -c
or was it
sudo update-manager -c -d

whatever, 1 of them kicked it off.