31st of May

Farm news
The ClimatePrediction work seems to have run out. I managed to get a few resends on one machine and the others are now on to other work. This week has been spent working on the Parallellas.


Parallellas
To get the 2nd Parallella going I had to cannibalise the fan off the Raspberry Pi. The Pi now has a 60mm hole in the top of case to vent the hot air :-) Not to worry I have more 60mm fans on order from FrozenCPU and when they come in will replace it.

I ended up re-imaging the 8Gb mico-SD cards with Ubuntu 14.01 (the image from Parallella) and then spent another 8 hours getting 14.04 onto it and set up for crunching. The process went like this:
edit the /etc/hosts, hostnames and host.deny files
reboot

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install update-manager-core
sudo do-release-upgrade
(takes around 5 hours to complete)
reboot

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get remove libreoffice
sudo apt-get remove thunderbird
sudo apt-get remove firefox
sudo apt-get remove ntpdate
sudo apt-get install fake-hwclock
sudo apt-get install ntp
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo shutdown now

I could probably remove a lot more, x11 springs to mind. At this point you have an Ubuntu 14.04 image with most of the modules needed to get going, so shut it down and make a copy of the SD card image, we can use this for other parallellas. The only thing that needs to change again is the host name, install boinc and then add the various projects.. The projects can be added via BOINCtasks.

I now have both off and running with the same image and crunching away. Hopefully I won't have to update them for a while. And this is what they look like in BOINCtasks (running on a Windows PC)

Its not the best place for them sitting on a rug on the floor, but they are close to the power point/power adapters. I need to sort out a better location for them (and the Raspberry Pi's).