TITLE:		SETI Hint
LFS VERSION:	any
AUTHOR:		Tim Plessers <tplessers@tiscalinet.be>

SYNOPSIS:
	This hint provides details about how to install the SETI@Home client 
	and join 'Team LFS'.

HINT:

1. Background on SETI @ Home

SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. 
It's an organization that analyses cosmic waves, scanned 
by giant radio telescopes. They are hoping to find a message 
from another world, one day.

Unfortunatly, the amount of data is so huge, that it simply
can't be processed by a couple of computers.
They need our help. You can download a client program that
connects to a server and retrieves a small packet of data (work unit).
Then, your computer starts processing the data as a background process
(7-10 hours needed) and sends back the results.


2. The SETI @ Home client

The program is written in such a way, that it only uses
the 'idle' processor time, that is when no processing is performed
on your machine. Also, it only needs an internet connection to send
and receive the work units. It is possible to run clients on
multiple machine using the same account. When stopping the client
during processing, it automatically resumes the next time you start it.

You can grab the command-line linux version of the SETI @ Home client at:

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/download.html

Note that there are different versions for each platform.
I use the i686-pc-linux-gnu-gnulibc2.1 which is optimized for Pentium II/III.

After the download, untar it:
$ tar xvf setiathome-3.03.i686-pc-linux-gnu-gnulibc2.1.tar

and move it to the desired directory:
$ mv setiathome-3.03.i686-pc-linux-gnu-gnulibc2.1/* /usr/local/bin

Start the client for the first time:
$ setiathome

Fill in the correct information and if all goes well, you should see
that the program retrieves 340kb data from the server and starts processing it.

Possible problems:

Q: I get an Illegal instruction error, and the client bails out.
A: You probably downloaded the wrong version for your machine, 
	try the i386 optimized version.

Q: The client doesn't seem to connect to the server.
A: You're probably behind a proxy/firewall. 
	Try 'setiathome -proxy my.proxy:port'
	e.g. 'setiathome -proxy 192.168.1.1:8080'

Q: It's still not connecting!
A: Maybe the SETI @ Home data server went down. Try again tomorrow.

Try to keep that client running.

3. Teams & Statistics

You can keep track of your personal statistics to see what rank you have.
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/individual.html

People are free to create teams, which can compete to eachother.
There are a lot of communities out there that created their own team
(Team Slashdot, Microsoft Foundation, Team FreeBSD and of course... Team LFS).

When you have completed more than 1 work unit, make sure that you join
Team LFS. Surf to:

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?cmd=team_lookup&name=Team+LFS

and click the 'Join' link. Follow instructions from there.


4. Bookmark these links

SETI @ Home homepage
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu

Team LFS statistics
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?cmd=team_lookup&name=Team+LFS