Boinctray - A system tray application for monitoring the BOINC client

Copyright Esko Arajärvi 2006-2009
edu@iki.fi
http://edu.iki.fi/programs/boinctray/

The program is licenced under the GNU GPL which allows you to copy and
modify this program freely. See the file boinctray.licence for details.

The program uses library called Tktray. See the file tktray.licence
for its licence.

Overview:

The Boinctray is a TCL program for displaying statistics of the BOINC
volunteer distributed computing system. The BOINC uses the idle time
of your computer for doing scientific calculations. This program
creates an icon to your system tray and displays the progress of
the BOINC computation in a window which you can place freely. The user 
can control whether the statistics window is shown all the time or only
when the mouse cursor is above the icon. It is also possible to choose
what statistics shown.

Running the program:

To run the program you need to have a TCL interpreter on your computer.
If you don't have one, you can get either pre-compiled binary version
or source files from the address http://www.tcl.tk/ . Many Linux
distributions have a TCL interpreter included in their basic
compilations. Using an interpreter is the most efficient way for running
the program.

Another possibility for running the Boinctray is to use a program called
Freewrap. The Freewrap makes it possible to use TCL programs even if you
can't install programs to the computer yourself. Just download the
latest release of the Freewrap from http://freewrap.sourceforge.net/,
unpack it and follow the instructions for creating an executable.

The Boinctray program tries to create a tray icon in to the system tray.
If this fails (for example if your window manager doesn't have a system
tray) program still runs, but then the icon is shown in a normal window.
Inclusion to system tray should work in the most common desktop managers 
in Linux, but doesn't currently work in Windows. (feel free to send a
patch).

For tray placement program uses library called Tktray. The tar package
includes versions for 32- and 64-bit Intel x86 machines. The file
libtktray1.1.so should be in the same directory as the executable or 
somewhere in the shared library search path. If the library file fails 
on your computer, you can try to compile it for your own system from 
the sources, which can be found at the package's homepage
http://sw4me.com/wiki/Tktray. If you have problems with compiling 
errors, this email may help you (it helped me):
http://mailman.isi.edu/pipermail/ns-users/2006-September/057322.html

Usage and configuration:

When run, the program creates an icon to your system tray. When you move
your cursor over the icon, a window pops up. The window disappears
again when you move your mouse away from the icon. Left clicking the icon
leaves the window open and clicking it again hides the window. You can 
drag the window anywhere you like.

To select your BOINC installation directory right click the icon, hold 
mouse button down, and select the appropriate menu item. The file the 
Boinctray needs to read is client_state.xml. It should be in the root 
directory of the BOINC.

In the right click menu there is also a menu option for configuring the
statistics shown. You can choose if you want see the individual project
credits or the total project credits. Also you can see either all the
started work units or only the currently active ones. The program shows 
percent of the work done on a work unit and can estimate the computation 
time remaining.

The client state file updates only from time to time. The Boinctray can
try to estimate amount of work done between these updates based on the 
work reported before. This option of course only works well if the BOINC
project reports the work done on a work unit regularly. It also expects
the programs to have a linear processing rate which is not always the
truth.
