Why are there not more WU's that can be run on Windows machines? Relatively few people have Linux, yet the vast majority of WU's are for Linux only. Surely you are reducing the possible processing of data by restricting the use of Windows machines. I personally have not been able to process data for this project for about four months now due to the lack of WU's.

Lots of posts on this in number crunching section. The project do not decide which applications to use. That is done by the researchers wherever they are in the world. Mostly the researchers will be used to programming on Unix systems. Another factor is the researchers use the programs available that best suit their research. If these are the ones developed for Linux, then they will use these. Porting them to windows would probably take longer than the wait for sufficient results to come back from Linux systems and it would stop them doing other work in the meantime.

At some point there will probably be more researchers using the WAH2 type tasks but there are not any groups doing so at the moment.

Oxford do not have the resources to manage all task types across all operating systems. There is a donate button on the front page of the cpdn website but the amount of money needed would be substantial and even them programmers with the right skill set and possibly more important with the interest in doing that work would need to be found.

In the past they have attempted to run task types across all operating systems and with most of the more recent task types that have been tried, failed with either Windows or Linux depending on the task type always producing an unacceptable error rate. (In some cases 100%).

The research groups that were providing work for Windows climate models disappeared last year.
Unknown reason, but: covid? budget cutbacks? Who knows.

And this BOINC based work is only a sideline for ALL the research groups.

But for the moment, Windows is dead, and Linux rules the roost.

Why are there not more WU's that can be run on Windows machines? Relatively few people have Linux, yet the vast majority of WU's are for Linux only. Surely you are reducing the possible processing of data by restricting the use of Windows machines. I personally have not been able to process data for this project for about four months now due to the lack of WU's.

In a similar M$ situation here, the alternative is to run a virtual machine to host LINUX. It's a bit of a faff for first time Windows users, but I've finally got Oracle VM VirtualBox running and Ubuntu. Good luck.

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In a similar M$ situation here, the alternative is to run a virtual machine to host LINUX. It's a bit of a faff for first time Windows users, but I've finally got Oracle VM VirtualBox running and Ubuntu. Good luck.

Well done. It would be good if someone who has done this could post step by step instructions along with any pitfalls they discover(ed). I may be wrong but suspect that the average Windows user will need detailed instructions for this rather than just knowing it is possible. - If I get my hands on a Windows machine I will give it a go but, I defenestrated in 1999 and haven't had a windows machine of my own since.

I am a Windows user who is tired of never being able to get any tasks for CPDN, thus I decided to see if I could run Linux CPDN tasks under Windows. Since I am a total noob to Linux, I decided to try to run BOINC within a separate VBox machine to support only CPDN Linux tasks

First, I upgraded my standard Boinc version of VirtualBox to the latest (6.1.22) as recommended by VBox. My current Windows LHC@home tasks running under VBox didn't seem to mind this upgrade.

Then I followed the instructions in this link:
https://itsfoss.com/install-linux-in-virtualbox/
to install Ubuntu v.20.04 in my VBox.

Then I followed this link to install Boinc and the proper 32 bit libraries to my 64 bit system:
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Installing_BOINC#64_Bit_Considerations

I logged in to the CPDN website and set up a separate set of preferences for the VM (School) to use 100% of the cores and 100% of the CPU. The VM itself has 4GB of memory and 10GB of virtual disk space. I gave it access to only one core.

The installation seemed to work fine. The unfamiliarity and the limited visibility of tasks in the Boinc Manager under Ubuntu threw me at first. I had to use the Event Log to see what was happening. I saw two tasks download and then die almost instantly. Upon investigation of the dead tasks, I found I was still missing a library.

Had to also do: apt-get install lib32stdc++6. Seems the list of libraries in the 64bit Considerations link above needs to be updated.

After another task failed, I realized I probably needed to restart the entire VM to get the Boinc Client to also restart.

I restarted the VM and then started the Boinc Manager. I can now see that I have downloaded a HadAM4 at N216 task and am chugging away on it with one of my cores. Should be done in about 3 months if all goes well.

I am now playing with VBox to learn how to run this new VM as headless. Seems to be pretty straightforward.

I have noticed that there seems to be some coordination between Boinc in VBox and Boinc under windows. This PC is an i5-9600K with 6 cores and 32GB of memory. Windows Boinc preferences are to use 92% of the cores and 96% of the cpu. Neither installation seems to be stepping on the other. The VM seems to have priority for its core, and Windows Boinc gets the rest. My use of the PC does not suffer from this as I do not let BOINC have the GPU when I am using the system.

We don't really have control over what is at:

https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Installing_BOINC#64_Bit_Considerations

but in the Linux forum here, there are guidelines for installing the needed 32bit libraries for cpdn on several common linux distributions.

https://www.cpdn.org/forum_thread.php?id=8916#62038

I will go to the BOINC fora and suggest an addition to their wiki.

I will now see how long it takes to get a response there.

Edit2:
It is in the list for Ubuntu on the link you gave

ia32-libs description is unavailable
libstdc++6 description is unavailable
libstdc++5 description is unavailable
freeglut3 description is unavailable

I will and withdraw my request on the BOINC forum. Should have checked first!

libstdc++6 description is unavailable

Should be lib32stdc++6 or 7 depending on release. Richard and I are going to look at the WIKI tomorrow to see what should go there.

After some discussion with Richard who has editing rights for the WIKI it has been updated. There is the possibility that a certain figure who also has those rights may change it back but I hope not.

Acording to the thread in the Linux section the libraries to add for Ubuntu 20.4 are:-

lib32ncurses6 lib32z1 lib32stdc++-7-dev