In a situation with folding under Linux, I would always recommend to have 2 setups.
A main setup, running FAH, and a cheaper alternative for experimenting.

For instance, buy a cheap second hand PC on eBay. A Dell, an old core 2 duo or whatever is in the $50 range; with GPU slot, and get a cheap, $25-35 NVidia GT 1030 from eBay.
Buy additionally a Linux compatible wifi dongle if you need it, a $15-20 (32-64GB) SSD, and experiment with it.
Overall, it's a sub $100 investment.
You learn how to use Linux, while your main rig (windows or Linux) is folding.

Whatever procedure works for a GT 1030, will work for all NVidia cards up to the RTX 2080.
For RTX 2080Ti, NVidia drivers call on another bit, so the 2080ti is not hotswappable with other cards, but basically, if your system is set up for a GT 1030, GTX or RTX card, you can turn off the PC, up or downgrade the card to a faster or slower one, by just physically swapping the card out, and boot the PC without any problems.

If you're running NVidia cards and Linux (I recommend Lubuntu 18.10 over mint even) on one PC, you can experiment different flavors of Linux on the other.
Once you've worked out a solution (eg: what flavor of Linux, how to install everything and make it work) on your cheap PC, repeat the procedure on your main rig.
The procedure will be 90-99% identical.

Keep logs!
Logs on PPD, temperature, GPU overclocking and power settings, Linux OS, driver versions,...
This so you more hard evidence of certain changes benefit the folding or not.
Believe me, after trying out a variety of settings and operating systems, numbers will blur, and a small sticky tag note with some main parameters can be a welcome reference point.

Not only learning how to use Linux, or experimenting with different flavors of Linux, but regularly NVidia will come out with new drivers.
Not all newer drivers will work better.
Current latest 430.26 drivers work slower than 418 drivers for folding.
All this can be tested before implementation on your main rig.

Another, Linux's new kernel updates, security patches, or is upgrades.
Occasionally vulnerabilities are exposed.
In my case, my main server was attacked a few days ago, since it hadn't received a kernel patch update, while my smaller unit did have a patched kernel, and on the same network, was unaffected.

Lastly, in case of hardware failure, and waiting for parts.
If your main server went out due to hardware failure, and you're waiting for parts, or trying to identify the problem, it's easy to just swap out your best graphics cards to the cheap alternative. While it won't give best PPD, it'll at least keep you folding in the meantime.

If you aren't too fond of Lubuntu with more of a windows 7 desktop layout, you can try Mint, which is popular and similar but less stable and a bit more bloated.
Kubuntu, which is based on the KDE interface, also a windows 7 desktop variant, is stable, but many find it looking less appealing, and is using slightly more resources.
Ubuntu or Xubuntu, which have more of a Mac Os looks,
Debian, which you will get for stability, server hardware, and performance.
Debian is a popular is amongst IT staff, but it's not as pleasing to work with, and commands vary slightly from Ubuntu variants.
Debian is the grandfather, Ubuntu and it's variants are the father, and mint is the child.
Redhat/centos is also supported. It's a lot different from Ubuntu/Debian.
Redhat would be the great uncle, centos the uncle, and Fedora the nephew.
Same extended family, but not quite the same family.
Fedora is most unstable. Since fah control needs python 2, you'll have to run fahclient headless on Fedora, which is quite a pain.

MacOs only supports CPU folding, not GPU.

Aside from that, FreeBSD and Intel's clear Linux aren't supported at this time.
Nevertheless, FreeBSD is based on Unix, which MacOs is too.
If fah CPU folding works on MacOs, it should work on Unix, and should be able to be ported over to FreeBSD .
But no GPU folding there.
Considering the fact that FreeBSD is an OS made for security, and known to lack in a lot of day to day performance tasks, and more progress and optimizations habe been done on Linux than Unix, I would stick with a Linux based, preferably Ubuntu derived variant for folding.

I finally managed to get it installed and working on Debian Buster RC2.
I copied my config file from the Windows partition and it worked fine once I got OpenCL up and running.
Will check in the morning to see how the tasks worked out.

The only thing I need now is a control for it since fahcontrol doesn't install.

I'm looking for Finish and stop command. Like in advanced control.

there is no finish command unfortunately. what that command actually does is modify the xml file and then restarts the program to get the program to stop once finished.
 

Chris21010
there is no finish command unfortunately. what that command actually does is modify the xml file and then restarts the program to get the program to stop once finished.
 

Correct. It will not dL a new wu.

I've determined that running the client directly from a terminal is best. And that giving the command --finish does in fact work.

I'll have to give that a try myself.  Thanks!
 
d

this just means that Stanford will finally be forced to update their FAHControl at some point soon.

bill1024
...  I installed Ubuntu 18.04 to run some Seti in Linux for a challenge, it gets way better PPD ....

Better PPD over another Linux distro?  (or we just talkin about Windows). Been running Mint only so far but did try a few variations 10+ years ago. 

Never had luck doing a mint install with a 1080ti in the slot. I've always had to install with a 1070 or less and change it out afterwards.
Going to fire up the open air up in a few days and run seti again. I need to pay more attention to the announcements on the crunchin side.

Improvements are only linux-windows.
Debian, mint, Ubuntu and it's variants, all work the same.
Perhaps there might be a slight difference between rpm based Linux (like redhat, Fedora,...) Vs Deb based Linux, but I don't think it's a lot.

Once you install FAH, you need to install opencl drivers, then reboot the service, then change GPU from false to true, and the client will automatically download the GPU.txt file.
Then restart the service again, and you now should be running all GPUs and cpu.
Delete CPU slot, as it's not beneficial, and run gpu only.

There's no reason why you can't run plex on linux.
Just copy the library over database and all.

Was going over this thread again, and wondering if anyone actually has benchmarked how much % a GUI takes from folding performance?
Probably less than 1% on an RTX2080, but for those running lower end hardware (eg: GT 1030), how much does running FAHClient on a headless OS improve performance over a GUI?
 
It would have been an interesting topic, if it wasn't for the fact that Nvidia-Xserver (runs only on GUI) is needed for overclocking, and in most cases also fan control.
As Terminal commands for fan control are very wonky, and won't work on most pcs.
 
 
Another thing I want to ask the community, is the installation procedures for multi GPU folding.
On 18.04/18.10 or before, one had to exit the GUI (CTRL + ALT + F1) (or F2); disable the GUI server (LDDM, LightDM, or SDDM, or other), sudo init 3, and install the Nvidia.run files (sudo ./nvidiasomethingdriver.run).
Because the package maintainer version (deb) that comes with Linux, is only good for 1 GPU.
Multi GPU setups result in broken desktop experiences. (mouse going off screen won't come back on, no desktop background, or the background is the picture of the last window you had open)...
 
The newer 19.04 version has given me some issues in this procedure, as that the GUI server never really unloads.
I think I'd probably have to 'sudo apt purge' it, because I've never been able to install the .run files correctly.
 
Third thing I want to ask someone who's proficient in Linux about is:
If you install the same linux versions with the same parameters (name, pc name, etc...), how come the desktop background ends up being the same on both. And uninstalling a program on one, uninstalls it on another?
I haven't been able to figure this out, and wonder if this is some sort of Lubuntu specific sync thing, or if this is general Linux (Ubuntu) related, or if it's just mighty coincidence that both programs disappeared at the same time on both PCs?

Been there, done that! Luckily I got the whole installation procedure down to 15-20 min, so not too much time was lost.
The .deb files from the installer did give errors for me, but maybe only because I added a GPU later.
Perhaps they work fine when all GPUs are installed at driver install.