What flavour of Linux?

I googled around and I saw that pclinuxos is a real distribution of Linux and is a derivative a Mandriva.

If it is almost the same as Mandriva you could look at the package system of pclinuxos. They probably have almost the same package system with some fancy gui that will make it easy to install boinc.

Maybe you should look at the handbook of pclinuxos (if there is one) on how to install packages. But most linux distributions lack of good handbooks and manuals.

I have read through all that and it seems they don't really encourage people to install software the "hard" way as they put it so I guess I'll contact them and see if I can get them to add BOINC to the Synaptic repository which would certainly make life easier.

I'll let you know how it goes.

I think you answered your own question there but I am working on a test box so worst case scenario I guess I reinstall.

I see where I can add repositories and am willing to try but I guess mostly I'm just unclear as to whether pointing it at BOINC would give it the correct software or not.

We're probably both on shaky ground but would you say I should try pointing it at the BOINC Linux client download page?

I found a tutorial for Unix service installation that I followed and I seem to be close as I have boinc showing up in the Control Center as a service and it shows it as running.

The only glitch I see is when I started the boincmgr for the first time I entered my username and password as I've always done when installing, then the project url and I end up with a message in the communications tab that says "access to reference site succeeded - project servers may be down" in one line and then in another line it says "scheduler request failed: problem with the SSL CA cert (path? access rights?)

It's been giving the same message all night and isn't downloading any work units so do you happen to have any idea what the glitch might be?