I run Gentoo amd64 (not ~amd64) on my Armari workstation. I've installed the Gentoo BOINC package at its one available version, 7.2.0. Gentoo uses the directory /etc/conf.d/ for packages to set whatever variables they need, and this is the content of /etc/conf.d/boinc:

USER="prh"
GROUP="prh"
RUNTIMEDIR="/home/prh/boinc"
BOINCBIN="/usr/bin/boinc_client"
ALLOW_REMOTE_RPC="no"
NICELEVEL="19"

BOINC runs nicely, but it would be good to get the GUI running. I can run it from the command line thus:

boincmgr -e /usr/bin/boinc_client -d /home/prh/boinc

but I haven't found a way to do this in the GUI. The program cannot connect to localhost.

I tried setting ALLOW_REMOTE_RPC="yes" but that didn't help. I also tried creating an XML file in the default Gentoo data directory, /var/lib/boinc, with this content:

$ cat /var/lib/boinc/cc_config.xml
<cc_config>
  <data_dir>/home/prh/boinc</data_dir>
</cc_config>

but that didn't help either.

Is this a question for KDE (my desktop environment) or can I solve it in BOINC?

Just after posting that, of course I found a way to configure KDE:

$ cat /usr/share/applications/boincmgr-boinc.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Name=boinc
Type=Application
Comment=The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing
Exec=boincmgr
TryExec=boincmgr
Icon=boinc
Categories=Math;Science;
Path=/home/prh/boinc

I only had to change the path entry. Sorry for making a noise.