Manually Uninstall SETI@Home OS X?

[deemery]

Does anyone know how to manually uninstall SETI@Home OS X? There's an apparent bug that has the net effect of hanging my mac (causing me to reboot; it locks up the screen.) I've deleted the application itself, but there is a daemon that apparently gets started somehow, which must be itself started during the boot process.

The SETI@Home documentation refers me to an uninstall script that I did not get with the application.

Thanks in advance! dave

[Phil St. Romain]

Dave, check your login items in your Login Preferences and be sure that's clear.

Also, your /Library/Screensavers and delete anything Seti.

Finally, your /Users/name/Library/Preferences folder might have something.

Try all that and see if you find something.

[deemery]

Ah, here's the secret:
/Library/StartupItems has a folder in it labeled SETI@home. That folder has two files, one a ".plist" file and the other a shellscript (#!/bin/sh) that launches the SETI screensaver daemon.

To keep SETI from running, remove this folder and reboot.


I have a couple of questions about this:
1. What application uses the ".plist" files? Each folder in StartupItems has its own StartupItem.plist; obviously some application iterates through
/Library/StartupItems, processing each folder's StartupItem.plist.

2. Does anyone know when entries in /Library/StartupItems gets processed? Is this before or after entries in /etc/*rc* get handled? Is there a general tutorial on how MacOS X boots up?

3. (Maybe the only easy question of the lot :-) During startup, where do messages to the system console get recorded?

Thanks! dave

[level9]

If it helps any, I use the command line version, it's under darwin on their download page (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/unix.html), scroll down to where you see "powerpc-apple-darwin1.2:". It's faster and I can let it run all the time, on a faster machine. There's also SetiDockling (http://remi.zara.free.fr/mac/setidockling/), which is excellent, you can set it's priority and start and stop it from the dockling, etc.

[nicola]

To completely uninstall SAH (let alone SETI@home_OSX.app), look also for
/Library/Application Support/SETI@home_Data
/Library/Receipts/SETI@home_OSX.pkg
/Library/S@hScreenSaver/SETI@homeInit.app
/Library/StartupItems/SETI@home

Then
1. What application uses the ".plist" files?
SystemStarter, AFAIK (see /etc/rc, near the bottom of the file).
http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/documentation/howto/html/SystemStarter_HOWTO.html

2. Does anyone know when entries in /Library/StartupItems gets processed?
Invoked by /etc/rc. See above...

3. During startup, where do messages to the system console get recorded?
Not sure I understood this... do you mean /private/var/tmp/console.log?

[Sparkie]

All this UNIX techno stuff is very interesting but the Install Script can just be downloaded from http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php - once you get the folder unzipped the full uninstall script run flawlessly - find it en the 'extra' folder...