Comment 3 for bug 1407452

Okay, I screwed up the initial testing: in short, it all works when logged in as the current user.
(Note: do *not* enable SSH X forwarding when testing)

This PC automatically logs into an X session as user1. Remember: user1 is logged in before boinc starts.

1. sudo service boinc-client stop
2. Change BOINC_USER=boinc to BOINC_USER=user1 in /etc/default/boinc (some parts of the init script can be cleaned up too)
3. Add "sleep 10" to startup() in /etc/init.d/boinc-client to allow the user to log in (needed)
4. sudo chown -R user1: /etc/boinc-client/*
5. sudo chown -R user1: /var/lib/boinc-client
6. sudo service boinc-client start

05-Jan-2015 13:10:56 [---] CAL: ATI GPU 0: AMD Radeon HD 7400/7500/8300/8400 series (Scrapper) (CAL version 1.4.1848, 768MB, 648MB available, 463 GFLOPS peak)
05-Jan-2015 13:10:56 [---] OpenCL: AMD/ATI GPU 0: AMD Radeon HD 7400/7500/8300/8400 series (Scrapper) (driver version 1642.5 (VM), device version OpenCL 1.2 AMD-APP (1642.5), 768MB, 648MB available, 463 GFLOPS peak)
05-Jan-2015 13:10:56 [---] OpenCL CPU: AMD A4-5300 APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics (OpenCL driver vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., driver version 1642.5 (sse2,avx,fma4), device version OpenCL 1.2 AMD-APP (1642.5))

Downloading directly from BOINC and running as user1 works out of the box.

So there are permission problems in the BOINC packages (in Trusty at least) that will not allow the GPU to be detected. The line "xhost local:boinc" is not enough to grant user:boinc access to the GPU.

This thread talks about some workarounds, but this really needs to be fixed (if possible):
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=6307

I don't think this is an upstream issue: I think it needs to be fixed this end.