It appears BOINC w/ CUDA requires gdm to be running first.

[Skip Guenter]

Hey ya'll,

First a HUGE THANX for all the good stuff ya'll do!

On to my problem...

I recently installed an 8800GT card into each of two different machines.
One my normal desktop (Ubuntu v8.10 64b) and another into a headless,
diskless number cruncher (Dotsch/UX / Ubuntu v8.10).  There was little
problem with Intrepid machine as I only had to create a link
in /var/lib/boinc-client to libcudart.so to resolve an error message.

The install on the Dotsch/UX machine was another thing.  I'm trying to
work with the author of that distro on what I believe the problems are
when the machine is running off of a served up NFS.  

Anyway, to get around this I installed a HDD back into that machine and
installed Jaunty on it (v9.04, 64b).  All went well with the same link
needing to be added into /var/lib/boinc-client.  

On BOTH machines I installed v6.4.5 deb package from 'getdeb' Intrepid
64b.

On the 2nd (normally headless) machine I had the gdm NOT starting
automatically via a rename of the "S30gdm" in rc2.d to "s30gdm". 

I then noticed that BOINC was throwing errors saying "missing CUDA
device".  I started the gdm back up and then restarted boinc-client.
This resolved the error.  I then reset the gdm to auto start and
rebooted the machine to make sure it would be OK on a restart.  It was
not.  I again had the missing CUDA device message.  

I looked at /etc/rc2.d and it appears to me that boinc-client is started
at S20 and gdm is started at S30.  IF (that's a BIG IF) I understand
correctly that means that boinc-client is already running by the time
xsession/gdm is started.  I think this is a problem because I believe
the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf contains things needed by the nvidia device
driver which in turn is needed by BOINC to recognize the CUDA card.

Is there a simple rename that I could do to resolve this locally?
Something along the lines of:

sudo mv /etc/rc2.d/S20boinc-client /etc/rc2.d/S32boinc-client

I'm afraid there may be something else that would have to match an
action like the above on another file but I don't know what it would be.

I don't know how to report this as an official problem but still would
appreciate anybody that could help with a local fix.  

If somebody wants to point me to something on how to report the bug I'll
try to fill out the forms. 

Thanx in advance, Skip
República de Tejas, Centro