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How do we start mining Ether on a Debian / Ubuntu / GNU+Linux based computer?

Are there PPAs or special repositories?

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  • As a practical matter, some of the details depend on whether you want to run radeon or nvidia GPUs. Could you pick one and edit the question to clarify this?
    – Paul
    Jan 20, 2016 at 21:02
  • Do you want direct mining or via a pool? Pools are good to begin, because pools provide a great deal of feedback, and fractional rewards if your GPU is on the low end. Otherwise, you need patience and lots of "on" time as it takes days to mine a full block with a single GPU.
    – Paul
    Jan 20, 2016 at 21:10
  • People, this is actually a good question. Please upvote it!
    – Jeff Coleman
    Jan 21, 2016 at 5:56
  • @Paul - this would be an nvidia system
    – user75798
    Feb 25, 2016 at 8:15
  • mining on 16.04 but its slows down my computer
    – user3420
    Jul 16, 2016 at 14:16

4 Answers 4

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I wrote how to do GPU mining for Ethereum with Debian/Ubuntu here: https://www.meebey.net/posts/ethereum_gpu_mining_on_linux_howto/

TL;DR

Install/use Debian 8 or Ubuntu 16.0.4 then execute:

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ethereum/ethereum
sudo sed 's/jessie/vivid/' -i /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ethereum-ethereum-*.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ethereum ethminer
geth account new

Copy long character sequence within {}, that is your <YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS>. If you lose the passphrase, you lose your coins! 

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-amd64 build-essential
chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-367.35.run
sudo NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-367.35.run
ethminer -G -F http://yolo.ethclassic.faith:9999/0x<YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS> --farm-recheck 200
echo done
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  • Link only answers are not encouraged and will get deleted eventually.
    – niksmac
    Sep 12, 2016 at 1:22
  • 1
    To be more specific, this answer will be fine if you post your main points here a well. The answer should make sense and be useful even if the link goes dead
    – Tjaden Hess
    Sep 12, 2016 at 2:15
  • Package linux-headers-amd64 is not available, but is referred to by another package. This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source
    – Aryeh Armon
    May 30, 2017 at 16:26
  • 1
    This line sudo sed 's/jessie/vivid/' -i /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ethereum-ethereum-*.list doesn't work. Produces: sed: -e expression #1, char 14 unterminated "s" command. Fails with /s/... also.
    – user7642
    Jun 29, 2017 at 14:44
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Quickstart

The setup that most people use is a combination of two PPAs, the Go Ethereum (geth) client for managing the work-fetching and accounts, and the C++ Ethminer.

All you need to do once both are installed is to run geth --rpc and then in another terminal run ethminer -G

Tutorials

There are lots of great tutorials out there, my favorites are:

  1. The Ethereum Gitbook is an excellent resource for many things, mining not least.
  2. Stephan Tual's guide is a bit technical, and might be outdated, but very thorough.
  3. The ethereum.org site has a quick mining guide, with links to others.

In addition, @linagee reccomends

https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/wiki/Mining#gpu-mining

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5

There are instructions to start mining with Linux on the wiki of the official Golang implementation. Note that to mine efficiently, you need a GPU miner, which requires an AMD or NVidia graphics chipset and OpenCL (AMD, NVidia).

For AMD, download ADL_SDK8.zip from http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/graphics-development/display-library-adl-sdk/ and AMD-APP-SDK-v2.9-1.599.381-GA-linux64.sh from http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/opencl-zone/amd-accelerated-parallel-processing then run the following commands as root:

./AMD-APP-SDK-v2.9-1.599.381-GA-linux64.sh
ln -s /opt/AMDAPPSDK-2.9-1 /opt/AMDAPP
ln -s /opt/AMDAPP/include/CL /usr/include
ln -s /opt/AMDAPP/lib/x86_64/* /usr/lib/
ldconfig
apt-get install fglrx-updates
aticonfig --adapter=all --initial

For NVidia, see https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/comment/8889/#Comment_8889

Once you have OpenCL set up, you need the C++ implementation of Ethereum. On Ubuntu, it's available from a PPA. For other distributions, see the wiki.

You then need to have a coinbase account before you can start mining.

geth account new
geth --rpc --rpccorsdomain localhost 2>> geth.log &
ethminer -G  // -G for GPU, -M for benchmark
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  • 2
    Thanks for the swift reply, but answers should not be simply links.
    – user75798
    Jan 20, 2016 at 20:43
  • Links like this have been known to move and go bad. For this reason, most SE sites require answers to be substantive when links are ignored.
    – Paul
    Jan 20, 2016 at 20:43
  • @high110 Thank you for your edit, but copy-pasting text without formatting and links makes it completely unreadable. You also included irrelevant text, such as instructions for OSX. Please copy the relevant parts, preferably adapting them for the actual question at hand, like this.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Jan 24, 2016 at 22:23
  • @Gilles - thanks for letting me know. I've approved your additional edits. Live and learn.
    – high110
    Jan 24, 2016 at 22:24
4

If you use AMD graphics cards and Ubuntu 14.04 server, this script will set everything up for you (some instructions in the comments as well).

https://github.com/skmgoldin/AMDEthMiner/blob/master/setupminer.sh

Edit: just revisited this and it looks like blockapps isn't hosting the genesis block at that URL anymore. Find it somewhere else. :p

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