I recently installed BOINC using packages on my new Ubuntu system. I could start it and connect to Rosetta, but before finishing the first work unit I needed to restart my computer. I shut down BOINC Manager and checked the box "Stop running science applications when exiting the Manager". After reboot I couldn't get it started again. BOINC Manager can't connect to localhost, and I've read a lot of instructions trying to get it working from the command line. "sudo /etc/init.d/boinc-client restart" won't start anything, for example (I checked with "ps -A"). Neither BOINC Manager nor "boinccmd --get_state" claim to be able to connect. Also tried running "boinc". It starts, but claims that the computer isn't connected to any projects, and even then BOINC Manager can't connect to localhost.

How do I get it started again? I only have a couple of more days before the deadline of my work units.

Thanks (and sorry for the newbie questions)!

This sorted itself out. Here's what the installation instructions said:

After the installation is finished the daemon is configured to start up automatically every time the computer is turned on. You can temporarily disable or re-enable this by modifying a setting in the file /etc/default/boinc-client:

# Set this to 1 to enable and to 0 to disable the init script.
ENABLED="1"

I didn't want the program to start automatically, but I still wanted to have the option of starting it whenever I wanted to. It turned out that changing that flag to 0 made it impossible to start it at all, not just "when the computer is turned on", as stated in the instructions. After I changed it to 1, the program started without any fuss.