I write this in case somebody else finds it useful.

A couple of months ago, I bought a Rikomagic MK902IILE (which uses Xubuntu) and a Rikomagic MK902II (using Android 4.4.2). I got BOINC running immediately on the Android one.

On the Xubuntu one, I persevered, but only got Computation error when running BOINC, because none of my BOINC projects were able to use the ARM architecture.

I had stumbled across a company that claimed to be able to facilitate installing and running i386/i686 applications on ARM. It's called Eltechs, and the application they sell is called ExaGear Desktop.

I dilly-dallied for some weeks, and eventually took the USD30 plunge a week ago after satisfying myself that I would probably be able to use it.

Within a couple of days, I received the download link, along with my licence key and instructions for a couple of critical steps.

I installed the package without any problems.

I then started exagear:

user@RIKOMAGIC:~$exagear
Starting the shell in the guest image /opt/exagear/images/ubuntu-1204lts

I wasn't able to use sudo inside the shell:

user@RIKOMAGIC:~$ sudo apt-get update
ExaGear itself does not support running SUID or SGID binaries,
they must be started using the binfmt_misc wrapper.
Please see the user manual for the details.

Then, I spent a day or two trying to resolve this issue so that I would be able to get BOINC running on the device. In the end, the solution was to enter su in the host system before starting exagear:

user@RIKOMAGIC:~$ sudo su
[sudo] password for user: 
root@RIKOMAGIC:/home/user# exagear
Starting the shell in the guest image /opt/exagear/images/ubuntu-1204lts
root@RIKOMAGIC:~# apt-get update
root@RIKOMAGIC:~# apt-get install boinc

I then exited su and exited the exagear shell.

Then, critically, I:
1. Entered su again in the host system (Xubuntu)
2. Started exagear
3. Started boincmgr (I did all this in order to make sure that I was running boincmgr inside the exagear shell)
4. Added my projects
5. Checked that tasks downloaded and seemed to start OK. They did.

I started the first tasks 22 hours ago. They still have some time left to run. I won't know for sure that it's all successful until these first tasks have been completed and uploaded. It's looking good though.

Note: One of my projects is vLHCathome. I tried to install VirtualBox in the guest system exagear using

apt-get install virtualbox

. The installation process started and ran, but I'm not sure if it was successful or not. I'll leave BOINC to run now, and just keep an eye on whether any vLHCathome tasks ever start running.