Folding@Home screen saver for KDE
It bugged me that there was no fancy visualization front end around for Folding@Home that yields more than a progress bar and whatever else it could extract from the unitinfo.txt file. Especially the PS3 client looks awesome (I've never seen the Windows client) so I thought it's time to do one myself. It didn't take me too long because I've already written a KDE screen saver for a molecule dynamics framework at University of Stuttgart/HLRS.
So, here it is. FAHss displays the current work unit as an OpenGL model. The configuration dialog is a main part of the application and aims to give the user a choice as to how it should handle rendering. It allows the user to choose to ...
There are several features which aren't implemented yet (such as core status or CPU usage) but it's already usable. Maybe I'll set the project up on Google Code some when, but for now I'm hosting it on my own server. It can be checked out like this:
svn co http://svnro.alphagemini.org/fahss/
I've also set up a WebSVN service to track changes at http://svn.alphagemini.org
So, here it is. FAHss displays the current work unit as an OpenGL model. The configuration dialog is a main part of the application and aims to give the user a choice as to how it should handle rendering. It allows the user to choose to ...
- let the camera move (e.g. rotate around the center).
- set the speed with which the camera moves.
- select a background color.
- draw a grid box around the unit and choose its color.
- display the models solidly or as a wireframe.
- adjust the number of subdivisions on models to increase performance.
There are several features which aren't implemented yet (such as core status or CPU usage) but it's already usable. Maybe I'll set the project up on Google Code some when, but for now I'm hosting it on my own server. It can be checked out like this:
svn co http://svnro.alphagemini.org/fahss/
I've also set up a WebSVN service to track changes at http://svn.alphagemini.org
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posted by Falko at 10:07 AM
10 Comments:
Ohhhhh !! This is nice... I have been looking for something like this for a awhile now. Thanks for making it.
Hmm I can't get this to run for me.
$ fahss.kss -setup
Unable to open unitinfo file
Where is it looking to get this at ? I would think that the setup should set this all up first.
Ohhh bad bad... You hard coded these paths....
In src/fahss.cpp line 113
Please don't do this otherwise this program is NOT portable.
Right, should have removed this. But even if I set the default to None, the screen saver wouldn't work. So at least (some) gentoo people will have it working 'out of the box'. Apart from that, what is not portable about a hard-coded path? Not hard-coding anything would also report 'file not found' on any system, I assume.
I have seen other screen savers that needed a path to work but they worked to a point at least. You could start it up but needed to edit the path.
However I have run into another problem. Over night the SS completely hung my computer and I had to hard reboot and I have a dual core 2.2ghz box. This should not have happened so you need to find out if there is something that is causing your program to do this.
I've tested this screen saver for several days now and it never hanged. What exactly caused the crash? Are you sure it was the screen saver? If yes, I'd like to see a traceback or something that might give me a hint as to why it might have crashed your system. Is your graphics card properly cooled? Maybe reduce the number of subdivisions and check if that lowers the card's temperature.
About the paths, how in god's name shall the screen saver guess where the folding@home folder is located?
It didn't crash -- I said it hanged the desktop and I couldn't login -- I had to hard reboot.
So there is no crash log or trackback.
And my card is setup just fine and no other screensaver has hung my computer like yours did.
As for the path's isn't that what the setup is for? You got it in there right? Just tell the program to not stop if the file isn't found. It's that simple.
I'll look into it. Maybe there's a memory leak which causes the freeze.
OK, you're right. There's no need to quit the screen saver if there's nothing to draw. I removed the exits which should cause the screen saver to draw nothing at all upon first start. Thanks for pointing it out :)
Great -- I'll be looking for a new version release then.
Any chance to build this with KDE4.1 / Qt4 ?
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