Bitcoin Forum

I am getting incredibly frustrated at my lack of technical ability and am willing to pay .5btc for someone to help me for an hour or two.

This is my situation at present.

1. I have an old macbook pro that has the specs: 2GB 1067Mhz DDR3

2. I have just bought an Asus EEE PC Series with Intel 900MHz, 630MHz 0.99 GB RAM running XP with no CD drive

3. I have a 16GB memory stick


I would like to be in this situation

1. Have an offline computer (Asus) that is running Ubuntu and the Armoury.

2. Understand how to set up an Armoury wallet and have funded and removed the funds successfully a couple of times.

3. Understand how to set up a watching wallet with an online computer. (Is this even possible with a mac?)

If anyone wants to undertake this with me PM me and i will be in touch. Ideally i would like to work over the phone as i find it mush easier to follow when actually talking to people.


Thanks

I do not believe there is any mac installations that are easy to do.

"There are no official releases of Armory for Mac/OSX, because of the difficulty of packaging applications for it.  If you are not afraid of the command line (terminal), then you can follow the instructions on the Building Armory from Source page."
https://bitcoinarmory.com/get-armory/

Are you familar with Ubuntu? If the computer will stay offline, why bother? The risk of downloading a virus isn't there, unless it comes in the way of your usb stick. I'd stick with something you are familar with, and at most fresh install the OS with a PAID version if windows, not downloaded torrent.

I think i have just been recommended Ubuntu but I suppose this is not a must-have.

So will i need to buy a PC for the online computer too?

Thing is I have been a mac user for years and iI can't even find my way around Windows. lol

Create it in the Blockchain wallet? https://blockchain.info/wallet/paper-tutorial

There will be mac binaries soon.  We just recently figured out how to package it.  If you want to do it right now, though, you would have to follow Red Emerald's brew formula (https://gist.github.com/WyseNynja/4200620) (which involves opening a terminal and typing a few commands).  Obviously, the package would be better, but it's not ready yet.

You can use any OS online and any OS offline that runs Armory.  The data moving between them is platform-independent.

For the system without an OS, I recommend installing Ubuntu 10.04-32bit and using the offline bundle (which can be found here (https://bitcoinarmory.com/get-armory/)).  The reason for that is that if you want the offline computer to never touch the internet then you need to have a few dependencies installed in Linux for Armory to work right (that's what the offline bundle has).

If there's no DVD drive, you can make a bootable USB key installer.  You could use your 16 GB key once, wipe it just to get the OS installed, then go back to using it for other things.  Download Ubuntu 10.04-32bit CD image (http://releases.ubuntu.com/lucid/) (the "PC (Intel x86)" link at the top).  If making the USB installer in Linux, you can find the "Startup Disk Creator" application (google for it for your particular linux version), if you have access to a windows machine I recommend unetbootin (http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/) for making the USB.  If mac... I don't recommend doing that in Mac, as I just googled it and it looks like it can be complicated (but here's a link so you can try (http://evan.borgstrom.ca/post/1314205955/osx-bootable-usb-from-iso)).

The nice thing about the offline bundle is:  once you have Linux installed and you copy the offline bundle onto that system, you just run the install script and Armory works.  That's it!  

The bold-ed detail is making me want you to check whether or not you're on a Macbook with an Intel CPU. If you are on a PowerPC based Macbook, the new effort to create an easily installed Armory won't work for you, or at least it would surprise me if it did. Those that are more familiar with Macs than myself may be able to set us straight here (I'm not sure that the python based nature of Armory may sidestep this, plus whether or not a Bitcoin Qt build exists for PowerPC)

Check by clicking the Apple logo in the top left, then clicking "About this Mac". It will tell you either that it's PowerPC based or Intel based.

It's an intel model :)

you're almost certainly fine then. Apple machines can still be problematic with old versions of OS X and Bitcoin Qt, I believe only 10.6 onwards is confirmed to work with Bitcoin Qt 0.7, check that too. Not sure what the OS backwards-compatibility is like for 0.8, haven't been near a Mac recently to necessitate knowing. If you're on 10.4 or less, I believe that's a definite no-go.

I am looking to do this Wednesday morning GMT. Maybe start around 9 or 10am.

Anyone up for it?

Sorry I took so long to reply. It looks like the best course of action for you is as follows. Anyone else reading this please jump in here and correct me if I am wrong or you have a better idea.

Offline computer - Use the already installed OS (XP) If this computer never sees the internet again, it will work great with Armory on Windows - Installing Ubuntu is not incredibly necessary, especially since you're not sure how to do this. Save yourself the trouble.

Watching only wallet - You can import your Armory wallet backup to a blockchain.info wallet. (Tutorial needed as I can't seem to find it right now) Since Armory for your Mac is not so easy to install, again save yourself the trouble.

The thread title says paper wallet, but it looks like you are actually wanting offline wallets. Are you just referring to the printed backups?

Is your online Mac being used for anything but armory? It is possible to install Ubuntu on a Mac and then dealing with installing Armory would be easier.

Yeah my mac is my main computer that I uelse for everything. It's not massively fast and freezes a lot.

Red Emerald's suggestion is probably a sensible one then, if a little radical from your perspective. Remember that Apple used to send you OS X updates, they probably stopped that a while back now. This means any security improvements in Apple's OS are passing you by, and the only solution is to replace it, sadly. A stripped down version of Ubuntu (LXDE is not a bad choice) would probably breathe some life into the machine, and get you all the latest security based software updates, too. Or you could get the new version of OS X instead, but it'll cost you, of course

So...