Topic: Linux or windows 7 (Read 2691 times)

Back in the GPU days I've been using BAMT mining distro: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bamt-version-05-easy-usb-based-mining-linux-with-farm-wide-management-tools-65915
Running form USB, everything pre-installed.
All you need to do is edit one config file that pops up on first boot to set up number of GPUs and overclocking.

Well, that depends on what you pay for them, what the actual difficulty increase will be and how that affects mining income.
It's been said that difficulty goes up every two weeks and they speculate that it increases 10 to 20%.

Lets just assume mining income goes down as much as the difficulty goes up. +20% diff = -20% income.
Currently, a USB Eruptor will generate 0.004BTC per day.
When difficulty goes up 20% every two weeks, you need 2 whole years of 24/7 mining to make 0,279997442372135BTC. At the 58week mark, the two-weeks income will have dropped below 0.0001BTC (thats less than 1 cent USD if 1BTC = $100). By this time, you'd be at around 0.25BTC total. The total increases so little by this time, it's not worth it anymore.

However, if the difficulty only increases 10% per two weeks, you'd have 0,55766224756596BTC after two years. Two-weeks income will drop below 0.0001BTC after 72weeks (approx 1,25yr) and by that time, you would have made about 0.52BTC

So yes, it'll make you a little BTC, and depending on what you payed for them, it may slightly be profitable, purely on the hardware cost. I Haven't factored in electricity, but these things hardly use any so thats almost negligible. ($1 to 2$ per year per Erupter would be about right)

Edit: Ofcourse, this is purely in BTC.
If you buy Eruptors using regular cash (either exchanging it or buying them with cash), you're depending more on the exchangerate. If the exchangerate goes up by the time you discard the Eruptors, it'll have been profitable. If the exchangerate stays roughly the same it really depends on what the difficulty does to income.

Edit2:
Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that you can use an Eruptor for other coins than Bitcoin. As long as it's an SHA256d coin you can mine it with an Eruptor.
This may extend the life and increase your returns.

I haven't done the math but I hear they're not expected to make a profit...unless the value of BTC shoots way up. For me, it's not completely for the income (although who doesn't like that?), but I also just like to play around with computers in general.

This is a bit off topic, but are erupters a good investment these days?

true, it could have run on an older Win OS...I just don't have the OS CD (or maybe it was on floppies) anymore. I think it came with Windows ME and 64MB RAM originally, but somewhere a few years back I must have formatted the HD because WinME was gone...hence the need for a free OS. It was a bit of a trick to load CrunchBang (#!) on the HD since the #! .iso is larger than a CD (700MB), and the BIOS doesn't support USB booting. I had to put the HD in a different computer, load the OS onto the HD, then put the HD back in the old original computer. Anyway...I had a blast doing it! 

Yes, you could have done this with Windows
That machine will be perfectly happy running any NT5.1 kernel based version of Windows, like Windows XP or Windows 2000.
By modern standards, that's going to be too slow for everyday work, but XP started out on such machines.
Erupters are only equipped with a USB->Serial converter (thats why they display as being on port COMx) and they will happily work under such conditions.

On the other hand, Linux is free, old hardware is usually free, so it is a great purchasefree option. It will draw far more power than an RPi tho.
But you could combat that by installing as little hardware as possible, using a USB Flashdrive or IDE->Memorycard adapter, installing as little add-in cards as possible (Linux will run without graphicscard and operated through Telnet or SSH, called "headless") and underclocking and undervolting the CPU.

If you do have some spare cash, an Intel Atom based board will also be a great idea. They will use around 10watt.

One of the nice things about Linux is that you can give use to your old computers. This weekend I put CrunchBang Linux (uses very low resources) on my old HP 6736 for mining with USB Erupters (not using any GPUs). It has a 667MHz Celeron, 256MB RAM, and USB 1.0 (http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=bph06109&tmp_task=prodinfoCategory&cc=us&dlc=en&lc=en&product=60421). I'm pretty sure I couldn't have done that on Windows, and the cost was free. To save watts, I disconnected power to the CD and floppy drives and the setup uses only 42 watts when running, and would be even less if I had used a USB flash drive instead of the HD to host the OS. (For really low watts, you could go with a Raspberry Pi).

With everything running, including cgminer 3.1.1, I don't go over 135MB RAM and CPU use is negligible. The accepted shares, HW errors, and other measurements are in line with what I see in my other setups, so the age of the computer isn't affecting anything.

So, if you have Erupters and an old computer laying around, and you don't want to buy a RPi, put the old computer to use. Your only cost would be a powered hub (if using multiple Erupters).

I use Xubuntu for my mining machine, the ATI drivers are eay enough to install, this wiki is pretty good for the driver installation: wiki.cchtml.com

I also use it as my primary OS, it would drive me crazy to dual boot into Windows all the time to work. I would say that if you use Windows as your primary OS then just mine in Windows.

If you want display drivers for ATI or AMD video cards, go here: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx

You'll need the drivers from other two links I posted above (APP-SDK and ADL-SDK) in order to mine using GPUs. So, get and install those drivers first, and then get and install cgminer.

Is this the place where I download the drivers?
I installed Ubuntu on my current computer, it has a pretty nice GUI.
It's pretty cool that you can run Linux on the DS! 

Linux is very stable. Was running my rig without a reboot for over 9 months, no sweat. I had to power it down for a few hours last week though because of an electrical storm. I'll have to start my uptime all over again.

Yes, works on a DS. Did it on my silver DSLite. Just get a flash cartridge (M3, R4, TTDS, etc) and a microSD card. Then download DSLinux and put it on the flashcart. There was even a GUI.
If you happen to own a DS, it really is worth it to give the flashcart thing a try. There's a lot of so-called homebrew software. Quake has already been ported to the DS too (and actually very playable too) and loads of other pieces of software. (BeupDS MSN client, DSWeather, Voice-and-Pen-Chat, FaceBook4DS, Nitrotracker, etc etc)
Appart from the fact that a DS has no USB ports, it would be a great candidate to use as miner control. If it had USB, you could run DS Linux, plug a Block Erupter in and install CGMiner. Will fetch work through Wifi and everything.

When it comes to Distro's, it's pretty much personal preference. Anything recent should be just fine.
Ubuntu does seem to be the most comonly used, but Fedora (formerly Redhat) and Debian are also pretty popular.
Difference between Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu is the GUI system they use. There's a few different methods in existance for Linux, and everyone has their own preference. So in essence they are the same, except for they way it looks.
Any major distro will also come with an absolute metric shit-ton of drivers, so pretty much any fairly well known hardware will work out of the box, just like in Windows.

You may want to consider installing the latest AMD graphics drivers though. I'm not sure if the APP SDK (OpenCL support) also comes native with the major linux distro's.

If it's your first time in Linux you may want to use a guide to get it set up quickly for mining.
For learning purposes, I'd get an old computer just to play around in Linux.

There are URLs in the cgminer readme, but AMD has changed their links 1-2 times in the past year. You can get the APP-SDK and ADL-SDK from these:

http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/heterogeneous-computing/amd-accelerated-parallel-processing-app-sdk/downloads/

http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/graphics-development/display-library-adl-sdk/

Ok, thanks!
Where can I get the drivers though?

This is the Linux distro I mostly use for mining, and the guide I followed:

Complete Guide to Mine Bitcoin on Xubuntu 12.04
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gw7YPYgMgNNU42skibULbJJUx_suP_CpjSEdSi8_z9U/edit

This guide is a little old, but it will still work for newer versions of Xubuntu. There are other good guides on this site as well. Read through several and see which one makes the most sense to you. You'll at least be able to glean a few good points from all of the guides, and they have a way of explaining things that another guide may not have explained as well.

Be sure to read cgminer's README. It has a lot of important info that you'll need now, and probably will need later.

My advice: use Bitminter or Guiminer on your Windows system until your Linux box is ready. That way, you'll get used to how an operational mining rig operates, and it will get the "I've got to get mining NOW!!" bug out of your mind so you can concentrate on configuring the Linux system.

Really?  Ok then, I shall use Linux!  But it actually works on a DS!  lol!

Which distro though?
(ubuntu seems the best but what about x and kubuntu?)

I am gradually moving afway from windows.  only have one orwo computer sill on windows. HTPC for Windows Media Center. My Media Sever runs UnRaid (Slackware),  family PC runing Zorin OS (Ubuntu based) and I run MinePeon (Arch LInux) with 6 USB Block Erupters.

Linux all the way.

Recently I decided to move my miner to the basement - heat + noise and summer don't mix.  Also, my Win7 PC is a power hog, and I wanted something dedicated and smaller.

I've been out of the Linux lab for a long time, starting over 20 years ago.  Started with IRIX on SGI Indy, and various shells and X implementations later.  I haven't touched Linux since about 2002.

It took quite a bit of time and refreshing myself, basically learning it all over again from internet articles.  The finished product is a headless xubuntu nettop that boots to cgminer/anubis in less than 30 seconds.

If you're new to linux, you've got some work ahead of you setting up a miner.  You will need to be comfortable with the command line - it actually saves you time in the long run.  There is help in the forums and in articles across the net.  There are some very nice open source tools around that you can use to build a lightweight, reliable miner that's easy to manage remotely.


If you want it all out-of-the-can;  Do a Win7 setup that contains the tools you're familiar with at the expense of a license and (in my opinion) reliability.

If you're able to do some reading and not rely on checkboxes and .lnk files, then go Linux.  Once its configured - you can be confident it works.

If things can be done via Linux, I prefer Ubuntu, but I do admit there is still some things that are easier in Windows.
The past 5 years Ubuntu and various apps have been chipping away at the need for Windows.
Wine was one the best things that allowed to make to have almost no reason for Windows any more, even for gaming.

Setting up a pure mining rig is best done with Linux as long as you familiar with Linux based OS.
There is plenty of guides for using standard Ubuntu and getting a mining rig made out of it or using a custom and ready to go OS.

Linux is pretty much the Genesis of modern desktop computing.
It supports waaaaaay more than Windows does.
Windows is artificially capped to support up to X number of CPU's or Cores. Linux is only limited by what the hardware supports.
When it comes to drivers, there is far more available for Linux. Maybe not always official from the manufacturer, but they're there. Maybe you need to trace the hardware back to the chipset manufacturer (certain Realtek based soundcards, for instance). And even if your specific distro isn't supported, the drives can be built from source to fit in. That way, hardware is also never too old. If you can connect it, you can make it work. With Windows, driver support is often dropped. Many HP scanners and printers for instance are simply not supported in Win Vista and later (like the Scanjet 4470c), just because driver support has been dropped. There are no sourcecodes available and there are no tools to create Windows drivers.

And ofcourse, you can make Linux run on pretty much anything with a general purpose CPU, independent of architecture. Hacking a router with an ARM CPU? No problem! Smartphone? Sure, can be done! MP3 player? Yes, some will actually run Linux! Nintendo DS? Yup, also works! A Playstation or Xbox? Yeah, why not?!

The drawback to Linux is that is needs a different mindset to work with it and it may not always be as userfriendly.
That, plus the fact that Microsoft muscled their way into the pre-built computer market, makes it so that we now mostly use Windows.
We're all just lazy mouse-clickers
And yes, I am also a lazy mouse-clicker, but I can find my way around Linux. Just too lazy to do it