You can help COVID-19 researchers with your LibreELEC box

Hey guys, I just wanted to let you know that the LinuxServer team recently published two docker images to help scientists with COVID-19 research.

The images are for Folding@home and BOINC, both of which distribute compute jobs to the machines of users from all over the world in order to crowd-source scientif1c research related computations. They are both currently prioritizing COVID-19 related research such as "predicting the atomic-scale structure of an important coronavirus prote1n (spike)" and "understanding how it binds to the ACE2 receptor required for viral entry into cells".

We also just published docker addons so you can easily install them on your LibreELEC devices to help out.

That's right, you can help out COVID-19 researchers by donating your unused cpu cycles.

Here's a blog article we published about the images: COVID-19: How it's affected us, and how you can help

Here's some LibreELEC specific info on the images:

Both addons are avaliable through the Linuxserver.io repo. Go to addons, install from repository, Libreelec addons, Addon repository and install the Linuxserver.io repo.

Then go to addons, install from repository, Linuxserver.io addons, services and you can find Boinc and Folding@home.

When you install either addon, it will first download and unpack the docker images, which can take some time. Be patient. You can watch the logs via the following commands

journalctl -u docker.linuxserver.boinc -f
journalctl -u docker.linuxserver.foldingathome -f

Boinc: GitHub - linuxserver/docker-boinc

Fairly heavy image, because the app has no webserver, instead we run guacamole to display the gui app in a browser. Once installed, you can access it at http://libreelecIP:8088

Switch to Advanced view in the menu, because some settings windows aren't displayed properly in the simple view.

Add the Rosetta@Home project for COVID-19 research.

Works on x86_64, arm and aarch64. But not all projects support arm and aarch64

Folding@home: GitHub - linuxserver/docker-foldingathome

Lighter image, as it has its own webserver. Once up, you can visit its relatively simplistic webgui at http://libreelecIP:7396

For more fine grained control, you can access it remotely from another machine that has FAHControl installed. The default port for that is 36330 and there is no password auth.

Unfortunately, F@H is x86_64 only

Now, get folding!!

Quote from polo_joe

Hi, I can't get Boinc to work on rpi4, webinterface is not reachable.

http://ix.io/2f8u

See here: java - Tomcat 7.0.43 "INFO: Error parsing HTTP request header" - Stack Overflow

Are sure you're not trying https? It's http

Also try a different browser or open it in incognito with cache disabled

Quote from polo_joe

Incognito worked, but rpi4 not supported it seems.

Code

Mar 24 16:53:52 LibreELEC sh[22143]: 24-Mar-2020 16:53:52 [Rosetta@home] This project doesn't support computers of type arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf

http://ix.io/2f9r

That's too bad. May not be covid-19, but there are plenty of other projects that work with arm on there

Boinc's announcement about arm was a bit misleading. It got me excited at first as well. Turns out, they are now supporting arm64, not 32. Even though rpi4 has a 64bit chip, LE runs 32bit software on it (so does raspbian) and that's why it's a no go.

F@h is x86_64 only. Upstream doesn't support arm.

I should clarify, it was Rosetta@home's announcement that they would start handing out jobs for arm, but only for 64bit. Other projects on Boinc suppport 32bit arm.

Quote from rick.mccombs

I tried to get this to work on my raspberry pi 4 I left out the lines about Gauc. I'm behind a firewall I thought it would simpler.

I don't have any experience with docker. There doesn't seem to be any webserver running on 8080.

Code

LibreELEC:~ # netstat -l | grep 8080
LibreELEC:~ # netstat -l | grep http-alt
LibreELEC:~ # 

I have Rosetta at home running on my x86_64 computers and I had it on the raspberry pi 4 running Ubuntu, I thought I would try Libreelec on the Raspberry pi4. I've been running OSMC on a Pi 3+.

Before I go to a lot of trouble to try to get this to work, has anyone got Rosetta at home to send work to there Pi 4 using this docker?

Did you install it via the addon?

Quote from rick.mccombs

Yes

Check the logs with journalctl -u docker.linuxserver.boinc. That should tell you what happened.