computational errors

As both tullio and Bikeman have mentioned, you don't need to run BOINC as root. Also there is no need to have anything in the BOINC tree owned by root.

No, you can't rename BOINC because unless you are root why should you be allowed to interfere with files owned by anyone else? The system is simply protecting the integrity of files you don't own. Ownership and permissions are quite separate things.

That's exactly correct. The '$' at the end of the prompt string means you are an unprivileged user. Such a user cannot normally change a file owned by root unless the permissions (eg at least rw-rw-rw-) allowed it. It's extremely unlikely that a root owned file would have these lax permissions unless you want to have trouble.

You should be entirely unsurprised by this. This is exactly what the system is supposed to do to protect itself. Normal users are not allowed to interfere with files owned by others. You may be able to read them or even execute them but most times you shouldn't be able to change them. If it is required for you to change a file, you would normally own it.

Absolutely not. If you actually need more privileges, either become root using the root password or use 'sudo' in front of the normal command string and enter the appropriate password when prompted.

The goal you need to aspire to is to have an unprivileged BOINC user and 'ubu' would be fine for that if you don't want to create an extra one. At the top of the BOINC tree (and as root or using sudo) you need to do 'chown -R ubu:ubu dirname' where 'dirname' is the name of the directory in which the BOINC stuff resides. There may be more than one part to the BOINC tree, eg. separate subtrees for programs and data depending on how things were set up by the package creator. Do a 'man chown' and read about what the -R flag does.

Because of the rapidity with which BOINC changes and the normal slowness of package maintainers to keep updating the package, I would suggest that you don't install and use a prepackaged BOINC, unless you have no intention of even trying to keep up-to-date. It is actually pretty straight forward to keep up-to-date yourself once you understand linux a bit better. a linux BOINC upgrade is actually easier than a Win upgrade even though most would regard the Win install 'over the top' as being pretty simple. here's what I do for a linux BOINC upgrade:-

• * Download the particular shell archive from boinc.berkeley.edu to a shared directory somewhere convenient.
  * Feed it to a shell to unpack it (ie 'bash )
  * Ignore everything else extracted except for the three executables for boinc, boincmgr and boinccmd.
  * Make sure these three have execute permissions and appropriate ownership eg. rwxr-xr-x (ie 755) and ubu:ubu - change with 'chmod' and 'chown' if necessary.
  * Stop BOINC completely and confirm.
  * Copy the 3 files over the top of the existing 'old version' files.
  * Restart BOINC.
  

Once you have done one machine, if you have several on a LAN, the others can be done by just the last three steps.

It's just a bit more involved if you are setting up BOINC for the first time rather than using a package. You need a script in /etc/init.d/ or wherever your particular distro puts the startup scripts. You should take a look at the script provided by your packaged version and you could easily modify it to taste.