Before we start, I would like to take this time to explain what BOINC actually is.

What is BOINC?

BOINC is an open-source piece of software that allows users to volunteer their computers idle time to carry out scientific research. This in turn is called Grid-Computing. In other words, you can register to become part of a project which uses your computers’ idle time to search for new cures for diseases or help gain a better understanding of our galaxy. There are plenty of research projects available which you can find here.

Installing BOINC on the Raspberry Pi

In order to install BOINC on the Raspberry Pi, you will need to make sure that you have enough space on the SDCard. Other than that, you can go ahead and install it by typing in…

This will install BOINC and the GUI if you want to Remote Desktop (presuming its headless) into the Pi and check up on your projects instead of using the text interface.

Installing BOINCTUI on the Raspberry Pi

This was a little frustrating at first, however I managed to get help on the Raspberry Pi forums from a user named ghans.

Start off by navigating to the home directory by typing in cd ~/. Then type in the following to download the source code into the folder “boinctui” – presuming you have subversion installed. If not, then type in

Download source code –

After the source code has downloaded, cd into the directory by typing in “cd boinctui” – without the quotes.

Then follow, in order, the commands listed;

The compiling took me about 20 minutes give or take with my Pi over-clocked @ 1GHz.

NOTE: If you get any errors about missing libraries when running ./configure, you may need to run the following commands;

Once it’s finished, type in boinctui to load the Text-Based Interface and ta-da!. You can now manage your boinc-client with ease.