I've had problems getting various versions of BOINC to work on various Linux distributions in the past, so I thought it might be useful start a thread specifying combinations that definitely do work. I'm assuming that the hardware isn't quite as important of course.
Mint-14/Cinnamon is fine with 7.0.28 (x86). Use it instead of the default version of 7.0.27 with this distribution because that doesn't start automatically.