I came across a pile of old servers at work I wanted to
add to my minions of crunchers.

Because the machines only have a cdrom I did a
network install of kubuntu 14.04.
These are older Dell PowerEdge 2550 Dual P3's
All went well with the install.

After the install I opened up the terminal and installed Boinc.
sudo aptitude install boinc-client boinc-manager

All went well there with no errors.

My problem now is when I go and run Boinc Manager.
The video display goes nuts and I'm taken back to the
Kubuntu login screen.

Is there a fix for this?
I changed my video settings from 1024x768 to 800x600
and the same problem happened.

Is there a way I can manually add a project and my user name and pw
from the command line without having to use Boinc Manager?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

You can control the BOINC binary directly from the command line, or by using the BOINCCMD tool, which is essentially what BOINC Manager is without a GUI.

Command line options on the BOINC binary
BOINCCMD Tool commands

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I was really looking for a no nonsense guide to get things started
from the command line.
Here is the command line syntax for picking your project
Here is the command line syntax for adding your user name and password
Etc etc...

It was faster for me to connect to that machine from another
ubuntu machine with a working Boinc Manager.

We are crunching work units now.