Ought to work. Creat a partitlion just for Boinc. Make it large enough to hold the executables, the currently working files, and the next file to download.
Add the new partition to each /etc/fstab of each OS (assuming they are all Linux).
Then add a crontab to each distro to start Boinc on boot. (or perhaps, add Boinc to the autostart folder).
Just my 2 cents, but that's how I'd do it.
This is where I got the idea:
System Daemon Installation
Installing the BOINC client to run as a daemon is a little more complicated, but it will then run automatically whenever you boot your system. You should create a separate user to run the client from their own home directory, and initialize BOINC as that user. Then add a unix start/stop script to start the processs as a daemon at run time.
Create a new user - You must first create a separate user to run the core client. I called the user 'boinc'. On Red Hat Linux one can use the adduser command:
adduser boinc
By default this creates the user's home directory as /home/boinc but you can alter that with a command line flag.
Download core client - Get the executable from the web site from the project you have presumably already registered with. Right click on the file for your particular platform and this will download a file with a name like boinc_4.05_i686-pc-linux-gnu. Make the file executable with the command
chmod +x boinc_4.05_i686-pc-linux-gnu
and then move this file to the home directory of the boinc user.
Initialize the account - You need to log in as the boinc user, or su to that userid, and run the core client once to initialize the account with the project. Here's an example:
moonflower:/root# su boinc
moonflower:/root> cd
moonflower:boinc> ./boinc_4.05_i686-pc-linux-gnu
boinc_3.18_i686-pc-linux-gnu
2004-07-27 11:03:24 [---] Starting BOINC client version 4.05 for i686-pc-linux-$
Enter the URL of the project:
http://pirates.vassar.edu
You should have already registered with the project
and received an account key by email.
Paste the account key here: 352f0c806b28989010598e3b4f0391ea
2004-07-27 11:03:42 [
http://pirates.vassar.edu/] Project prefs: using your defaults
2004-07-27 11:03:42 [
http://pirates.vassar.edu/] Host ID not assigned yet
2004-07-27 11:03:42 [---] General prefs: from unknown project
http://pirates.vassar.edu
2004-07-27 11:03:42 [---] General prefs: using your defaults
2004-07-27 11:03:42 [---] Running CPU benchmarks
Once the client is running you can exit with Control-C.
Add the start/stop script - To get BOINC to run as a daemon at boot time you need to add a Unix start/stop script to your boot sequence. The procedure may be somewhat different on different flavours of Unix, but the idea is the same.
For Red Hat Linux I used this script, which uses the Red Hat functions, but for other versions of Unix you can easily modify this to work on your system. I put this script in the file /etc/rc.d/init.d/boinc (make sure it is executable) and then issued the commands:
service boinc start
chkconfig boinc reset
The first starts the BOINC client right away, while the second causes it to be started the next time the system is booted and stopped when the system is shut down.
I'd be happy to link here to variations for other flavours of Linux.
Please send corrections or suggestions for improvement to
myers@vassar.edu
Eric Myers <myers@vassar.edu> Last modified: 18 September 2004
http://noether.vassar.edu /~myers/help/boinc/unix.html
