LHC@home: Test4Theory

Under Mac OS X, BOINC has to be installed in a special way. In order to run Virtual Machines with VirtualBox in your computer, the user needs special privileges. However, the standard installation for BOINC in Mac OS X runs under an unprivileged user, so it will not work with this project.

WARNING: if you are running a Mac OS X server, you will not be able to run the script without adding your user to the sudoers file. Please, read the official documentation to add your user name to the sudoers file.

In order to solve this problem, we have created a small script that changes the user owner of BOINC to yourself, allowing BOINC to run as a user with more privileges, reducing the level of security for BOINC applications. As you have enough privileges to run VirtualBox, your BOINC client will too.

This is a temporary solution as the BOINC team is working on a fix. Meanwhile, you can use the script if you want to test this project.

So the steps for setting up BOINC in your Mac OS X computer are:

1. Install BOINC (skip to step 2 if you already have a BOINC client installed): Download the BOINC client installer from the official BOINC download link, double-click in the installer, and follow the instructions without modifying the default options.
2. Download the script: EnablingVirtualBox
   If you have BOINC installed and running, please stop it before running the script. Otherwise BOINC may stop working.
3. Run this script by opening a terminal, changing directory into the download directory where the script resides, and executing the command:
   1. sh ./EnablingVirtualBox.sh
   2. The output will tell you your usersname and the group admin, so you can go to the next step
4. sudo  sh ./EnablingVirtualBox.sh yourusername admin
5. (You will need to enter your Mac admin password if asked)
6. Finally you can attach your BOINC client to the project. All pre-existing projects will still work normally.
7. Note that this script has to be run again after each update of the BOINC client software is installed!

Note: The zip file has two extra files. The file *.md5 can be used to check if the script has been modified since its publication, and the *.sig  can be used to check who is the author of the script, as this file is the GPG digital signature of the script.