SETI is a distributed computing effort that attempts to identify possible extraterestrials. Each chunk of data that you crunch is called a work unit or WU for short. Crunching on a SETI team is very competitive and alot of fun, and a good use for idle CPU cycles. This link is to the AMDMB.com SETI forum, aka 'The Killer Frogs'.
Join a team, cooperative crunching is great.

what are the benefits of team crunching?

Copy and Paste is not the same as windows? how do I?

To copy and paste...

Select the text with your mouse...
Move to where you want to paste, then click the middle mouse button.

(You need to make sure the text you want copied is highlighted... when you move to the new window, dont' select anything new on accident...)

#!/bin/sh
#
# This script will be executed *after* all the other init scripts.
# You can put your own initialization stuff in here if you don't
# want to do the full Sys V style init stuff.

/home/james/seti/setiathome &

[ -f /etc/sysconfig/msec ] && source /etc/sysconfig/msec
[ -z "$SECURE_LEVEL" ] && SECURE_LEVEL=3

The way SETI suggests doing this is to make an entry in your crontab.
That way if SETI stops running for some reason (usually a communication error back to berkely) it will automatically restart without rebooting.
Here are my crontab entries:
0 * * * * cd /home/cfarley/seti; setiathome -nice 1 > /dev/null 2> /dev/null
15 * * * * cd /home/cfarley/seti; setiathome -nice 1 > /dev/null 2> /dev/null
30 * * * * cd /home/cfarley/seti; setiathome -nice 1 > /dev/null 2> /dev/null
45 * * * * cd /home/cfarley/seti; setiathome -nice 1 > /dev/null 2> /dev/null

cron will attempt to start seti every 15 minutes. If it is already running it ingores it. If it fails to start, it will try again 15 minutes later.

The SETI Unix README: setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/README.unix.txt

There is a nice PHP script I found to display your SETI stats. There is a link to it on my homepage. I'll send it to you if you're interested.

i'm running seti the easy (no cron jobs) way and i noticed with "top" that it runs in 'nice' mode. i have a couple questions...

'nice' means low priority, right?

does that effect performance when i'm leaving my computer to run only seti?

Nice usually has a number associated with it as in
45 * * * * cd /home/cfarley/seti; setiathome -nice 1 > /dev/null 2> /dev/null
The lower the number the higher the priority.
$ nice --help
Usage: nice [OPTION] [COMMAND [ARG]...]
Run COMMAND with an adjusted scheduling priority.
With no COMMAND, print the current scheduling priority. ADJUST is 10
by default. Range goes from -20 (highest priority) to 19 (lowest).

-n, --adjustment=ADJUST increment priority by ADJUST first
--help display this help and exit
--version output version information and exit

Report bugs to <bug-sh-utils@gnu.org>.