LHC@home

I am running LHC@home on various VMs and physical machines, recently it has started reporting that 'VirtualBox is not installed', why?

I only run VirtualBox dependent projects on machines which have VirtualBox available, i.e. vLHCathome.

LHC@home does not and never has claimed to require VirtualBox, so why tell me about it?

Regards,
Martin G Clayton

CERN has decided to merge all of their volunteer projects into one umbrella project and the new merged project was previously the sixtrack project. You can read about that here: https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/forum_thread.php?id=4002&postid=27816

The new and improved project will include virtualbox projects along with the sixtrack project which in not virtualbox.

If you go to the new project web site, and go to your preferences, you can see the other projects that will be included. Many of those projects require virtualbox.

Apparently, the new BOINC server checks to see if virtualbox is installed even if you do not have any of the virtualbox projects selected.

Your question was also asked by another person in a different thread. Apparently no one has been able to figure out why BOINC checks to see if you have virtualbox installed if you do not have any virtualbox projects selected.

Hope that helps.

i run BOINC on a linux box, and i have the same problem. heres what i dont understand:

i recently reinstalled my whole OS and apps, and after that LHC worked. it crunched a couple of units, and now i get this "virtualbox not installed" nonsense instead of any new workunits. the only reason why i installed virtualbox is for LHC, and all LHC does is complain, complain, complain. spoiled brat!
so whats going on here?

2012 macbook pro, ubuntu 16.04, BOINC 7.6.31, wxWidgets 3.0.2, in case that makes any difference.

...i recently reinstalled my whole OS and apps, and after that LHC worked. it crunched a couple of units, and now i get this "virtualbox not installed" nonsense...so whats going on here?

Sixtrack is the only sub-project at LHC that does not require VirtualBox and there are no Sixtrack tasks available to run right now (see "Tasks by application" on the server status page). Are your preferences set to only accept work for Sixtrack?

Are your preferences set to only accept work for Sixtrack?

yeah, they were. so i turned on most of the options. then it got a workunit for atlas that ended in a computation error. so did the next 2. im not gonna waste time on something that is so obviously flawed, so i turned atlas off again. not worth my time.

...im not gonna waste time on something that is so obviously flawed...

It does take a bit of effort to get VM tasks at this project running smoothly, but I don't think that "flawed" is a fair characterization. If you want to participate in this project and don't want to wait for the times that there is Sixtrack work, I recommend you follow Yeti's excellent checklist to see if you can get VM tasks up and running (perhaps starting with Theory which has the lowest RAM requirement and is not multi-core).

I am using BOINC and VirtualBox on Ubuntu to compute ATLAS tasks. I found using virtualbox from the apt-get repositories works out of the box eventhough it's not the latest version.
Using the repositories has pros and cons.

Starting with a fresh install, in Terminal:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install boinc
sudo apt-get install virtualbox
reboot

I have no previous experience with Ubuntu, but I'd be glad to help if I can.

For running other projects like CMS, Theory ... you will still need virtualbox afaik.

It's all good, but the problem is that BOINC can't detect virtualbox which is already installed on Linux PC. And I see that there is still no any kind of quick fix or any universal solution for this problem. Otherwise it should be in all FAQs of projects which use virtualbox.

It's all good, but the problem is that BOINC can't detect virtualbox which is already installed on Linux PC. And I see that there is still no any kind of quick fix or any universal solution for this problem. Otherwise it should be in all FAQs of projects which use virtualbox.

There is no problem and that's why there is no quick fix in the FAQs? It detects VirtualBox just fine on my Ubuntu machine as the Events Log excerpt below shows. Scroll down until you see the red line.

Wed 20 Jun 2018 09:59:03 PM MDT | | Starting BOINC client version 7.6.31 for x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
Wed 20 Jun 2018 09:59:03 PM MDT | | log flags: file_xfer, sched_ops, task
Wed 20 Jun 2018 09:59:03 PM MDT | | Libraries: libcurl/7.47.0 OpenSSL/1.0.2g zlib/1.2.8 libidn/1.32 librtmp/2.3
Wed 20 Jun 2018 09:59:03 PM MDT | | Data directory: /var/lib/boinc-client
Wed 20 Jun 2018 09:59:03 PM MDT | | No usable GPUs found
Wed 20 Jun 2018 09:59:03 PM MDT | | Host name: brad-HP-ProDesk-600
Wed 20 Jun 2018 09:59:03 PM MDT | | Processor: 4 GenuineIntel Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4590T CPU @ 2.00GHz [Family 6 Model 60 Stepping 3]
Wed 20 Jun 2018 09:59:03 PM MDT | | Processor features: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx pdpe1gb rdtscp lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf eagerfpu pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 sdbg fma cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic movbe popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx f16c rdrand lahf_lm abm epb invpcid_single ibrs ibpb stibp kaiser tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid fsgsbase tsc_adjust bmi1 avx2 smep bmi2 erms invpcid xsaveopt dtherm ida arat pln pts
Wed 20 Jun 2018 09:59:03 PM MDT | | OS: Linux: 4.4.0-128-generic
Wed 20 Jun 2018 09:59:03 PM MDT | | Memory: 7.70 GB physical, 7.91 GB virtual
Wed 20 Jun 2018 09:59:03 PM MDT | | Disk: 134.50 GB total, 43.89 GB free
Wed 20 Jun 2018 09:59:03 PM MDT | | Local time is UTC -6 hours
Wed 20 Jun 2018 09:59:03 PM MDT | | VirtualBox version: 5.1.38r122592

check user permissions for virtualbox

On my Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS system, I installed boinc from flatpak, as it would not run at all from an apt install (so sad, but a different thread and forum). I get the same dreaded virtualbox complaint in my notifications.
- One page said to take 4 steps and the third is ""boinc -dir ${HOME}/boinc" but I have no executable called boinc (a flatpak-ism?). Do I need a flatpak virtualbox to mate to a flatpak boinc?
- The posts here are a few years old, so will this be an forever problem?
- Do I need to attach to a different project, not LHC@home but Sixtrack?

---

For sixtrack you don't need VirtualBox. Unfortunately sixtrack does not have any task available now. All other tasks require either VirtualBox or Native Linux application. Unfortunately I don't know anything about Linux so I cannot help you there.

---