The first thing I had to do to get this to work was to obtain the updates for GPUs, for ubuntu this was boinc-amd-opencl.

Then I had to add into /etc/init.d/boinc-client the xhost command, which would give access to the GPU to the boinc username.

The information on the web was wrong about this. The command I had to add was:

xhost si:localuser:boinc

si means server interpreted, and the kinds of strings accepted are described in man xsecurity. Localuser implies a local username. The web articles I found claimed one needed to do xhost local:boinc, but the description of xhost:local is that it doesn’t take a username, and it makes LOCAL connections available. Which sounds good, but didn’t work. After doing xhost local:boinc it was the same as if I had just done xhost local, and I got an entry “LOCAL” when I did xhost, but it didn’t work.