This tutorial will help you to create and maintain a BOINC project with Debian. We are still (8/2011) moving paragraphs back and forth, but by following these instructions you will have a working project. How exactly this page will evolve depends on you all who you read this. We do not aim at substituting the BOINC mailing lists or the BOINC wiki, but rather attempt giving a red line to follow through it all.

The BOINC source tree comes with a BOINC server. That server however does not serve by itself but installs the skeleton for the real server. Consequently, the Debian package is named boinc-server-maker, allowing for the creation of an arbitrary number of truly serving BOINC servers for every machine.

In the following, please distinguish

  1. the folder to which the files of the BOINC server templates install ('/usr/share/boinc-server')
  2. the name of the Debian package providing those files ('boinc-server-maker')
  3. the location of your very own project ('you/name/it')

A BOINC project may harbor multiple applications. And those applications come in multiple versions. What version of what application goes together with what data is described in the work units.

The preparation from the Debian sources is not too different from a preparation from the original source tree. Debian should just shorten the process to a first success. The first version of these instructions sometimes presents side-by-side the "original BOINC textbook" instructions and the Debian way of achieving the same. This renders these instructions as generic and as educational as possible. Violations to that principle please report to us.