I am running Ubuntu 12.04, using the version(7.0.24+dfsg-1) included in the package manager. Communication with BAM seems to be working. I received 'work' once but now the BOINC manager reports "downloading work from server'. This condition has persisted for several days. How should I proceed?

Hi you should remove that version since it is a broken beta and use the one that Berkeley provides instead of the repositories otherwise do this:

There's some hold-up getting the 7.0.27 package backported into 12.04, there was a different bug found, (I haven't had an issue)...

There is the ppa repository, however that was just changed to 7.0.28, and I have not tested it yet so who knows what will or wont work. It should not have the "computation error" bug however as the 12.04 repository package currently does.

If you want to try the package from the ppa repository, (currently 7.0.28)
do (in a terminal):
sudo apt-get remove boinc
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:costamagnagianfranco/boinc
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install boinc


This will add the active ppa repository to your system and install boinc from it. This version gets changed regularly however, so you are more likely to run into problems using this repository, however for now at least you can have something that should work, vs. something that doesn't.

As I mentioned Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal) has a fix in it's repository, but there is some holdup getting that package into 12.04 as 12.04 is a long term support release and they want to make sure once the package is replaced, it will be a version that can be relied on for some time..

This is from the sticky thread of the same folder. I will post here for convenience: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=7595