Apparently, you can use Boinc (the new SETI@Home platform) as a system service. This is interesting (and useful). Downloading this init script and placing it in /etc/rc.d/init.d/setiathome with permissions 755 works fine under FC2, along with the following commands:

root@autumn(/etc/rc.d/init.d): service setiathome start
Starting BOINC client as a daemon:          [  OK  ]
root@autumn(/etc/rc.d/init.d): chkconfig setiathome reset

I tried to do this for MySQL as well:

root@autumn(/etc/rc.d/init.d): service mysqld start
Initializing MySQL database:                [  OK  ]
Starting MySQL:                             [  OK  ]
root@autumn(/etc/rc.d/init.d): chkconfig mysqld reset

This doesn’t seem to have worked. My MySQL server install was via apt, so I’m not sure that makes any difference at all. With a mysqld file in the same directory as the setiathome file, it seems like this should have worked…