Well, a couple of hours after I got BOINC to recognize my CUDA card under Ubuntu, I decided that there was a better way to set up my machine.
The computer in question is a home computer that gets used for email and a bit of web browsing and some really old games (via Wine). Generally the graphics card doesn't do much work. As my CUDA card (Nvidia Geforce 8600GT) only has 256M RAM, I decided that I would use the motherboard's built in Geforce 7050M to run the monitor.
Using "nvidia-settings" from the Ubuntu repository, I set the monitor on the 7050, disabled it on the 8600GT and rebooted. I did set the BIOS default card to the onboard 7050 to be able to see the POST and pre-login screens.
Guess what? No CUDA device found by BOINC on reboot!
After another hour of so, it seems as if BOINC just doesn't see the CUDA card on about 50% of startups regardless of whether it is set as GPU0 or GPU1. I resorted to using "sudo /etc/init.d/boinc-client stop" and "sudo /etc/init.d/boinc-client start" a couple of times before I got the required results. While this is OK in winter when the machine stays on for days at a time, it is a pain in the hot weather as I boot, check my mail etc and then turn it off again.
The three "24/7" office machines are turned off this weekend as the aircon is on a timer and as a result doesn't work on the weekends. As Sydney is having temperatures of 40+ Celsius, it seemed like a good idea to loose a couple of places in exchange for working PC's on Monday morning.
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