How to Set Up Folding@Home on OpenBSD

Now that the redhat_base-8.0p2 package has been released, getting the Folding@Home distributed computing client to run on OpenBSD is easy. For those of you who may not be familiar with the project, or know why it's a good idea to run this program, visit the Folding@Home FAQ.

To get Folding@Home running manually, follow these instructions:
  1. Install /usr/ports/emulators/redhat/base from the 3.4 ports collection, or get the redhat_base-8.0p2 package from the OpenBSD FTP site (or a mirror).
  2. Set up OpenBSD's elf2olf program (which tags binaries as a particular OS/architecture type) to be called properly when Folding@Home calls FreeBSD's equivalent, brandelf, by downloading this script (mirror) and putting it in the path of the user running Folding@Home. This is necessary to allow any cores the program downloads to work properly.
  3. Download the Linux console version B, the version noted as being for newer Linux distributions, from the Folding@Home download page (direct link).
  4. Run the client in its own directory with the -freeBSD flag, i.e. ./FAH3Console-LinuxB.exe -freeBSD. Once you've answered a few quick configuration questions, put it in the background with Ctrl-Z; note the background job number when doing so. Then restart the client in the background with bg , with being the number you were just noted. You'll never again need to interact with the program, so feel free to start it in the background in the future (i.e. from /etc/rc.local on startup).
For those who wish to automate the installation process, download Ivo Sarak's finstall script and run it with the command bash -c "./finstall". Support for this script can be found at the Folding@Home web boards.