I'm eagerly looking forward to the new release tonight with the Catalyst 11.6 driver and will begin using it immediately.  Thanks!

I'm running multiple Radeon HD 5000-series cards through adapter risers in x1 PCI-e slots with no loss of hashing speed.  Now if I tried to play a 3D game or something that has a high data throughput I bet performance would be affected, but not mining.

I tried upgrading Catalyst to 11.6 on my 0.2a Linuxcoin install, and without going into details, let's just say that either I fuxored it up or it simply didn't want to work    So I'm back to stock 0.2a again with Catalyst 11.5.  Needless to say I am eagerly awaiting Linuxcoin 0.2b with Catalyst 11.6 so I can throw some additional overclocking on my 5830s.

Are you guy who posted to Reddit saying something like "just some casual mining" and showed box after box of computer equipment in a rented storage locker?

I'm using a GIGABYTE GA-890FXA-UD5 with 4x5830 and I had a fairly fun time getting it to work.  I finally managed, though, and it's running correctly with two cards plugged directly into the mobo and two on x1-to-x16 adapter riser cables (one plugged into an x1 slot on the mobo, another into an x16 slot).  The key break-through I finally had was swapping around the card configurations until all four could be seen in lspci, then running aticonig --initial --adapter=all -f one or two times with intervening reboots.  Eventually all four cards could be seen.

Of course this is in Linux (Linuxcoin booting off a USB drive with persistence, specifically), so I don't know how relevant it is to you in Windows.

Yes, but the Radeons will hit the unprofitability wall at a much later time than the Nvidias will.  Heck, depending on how much you're paying for electricity, most Nvidia cards are probably already unprofitable, whereas Radeons still pay to keep themselves running (and then some).

There's only one Bitcoin network. If you aren't using the most efficient hardware, you're going to lose a lot faster than people using the proper hardware will.  Your inefficient Nvidia rig (as measured in MHash/KW-hr) simply can't keep up.

I'm running a 4x5830 Radeon setup (each of which takes 2x6 pin PCIe power connectors) off a Corsair 850 Watt PSU.  The PSU only provides four 6-pin PCIe power connectors; however, it does have a lot more 4-pin Molex power connectors, which I've plugged four of the Molex-to-PCIe adapters that came with the videocards into.  No issues there.  Note that these aren't splitters, they're just adapters, and they come with the cards, so presumably they're safe to use (otherwise Sapphire wouldn't ship 'em?).

Whoa!  Really?  I have four Sapphire Radeon HD 5830s that I am going to try this on tonight.  Thanks for the tip!

Do I need to uninstall the 11.5 Catalyst drivers first, or do I just install the 11.6 drivers in the usual way and trust them to overwrite everything appropriately?

No, Jack, don't discourage asbestos use.  If other miners get mesothelioma then that leaves more blocks for me.

(Kind of ironic here how we're bringing in the risks of real-world mining to virtual mining.)

I'd really like to hear if anyone has gotten four GPUs working on a motherboard based on this chipset.  The four x16 PCIe connectors make it seem like it should be possible, but so far, it ain't working!

Would there be any possible issues arising from connecting a GPU to the motherboard in the x16 slot using a x16 to x1 adapter riser from Cablesaurus?  Would there be any point in buying just a standard x16 cable and use that instead?  The reason I have the x16-to-x1 is so I could potentially use the x1 PCIe slot on the mobo, but that didn't really work, and you'd think the x16 slot would work better ...

Yank that mobo out of the case, build a two-tier chassis out of angle aluminum or wood, and take two of the cards off the mobo and put them on adapter riser cables.  That'll free up a lot more space between cards and give you a lot more room to run fans.  If you already have a bunch of spare wood laying around like I did then you're only out the cost of the cables, which ran ~$30 in my case.

Change the default background lxterminal color from transparent to black, as transparent is just unusable.

Have it use a blank screensaver by default instead of a random screensaver (this can suck away a lot of MHash/s if it randomly chooses a graphically intensive screensaver).

Great work on everything by the way!

I have a similar issue.  I'm running a GIGABYTE GA-890FXA-UD5 ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128441 ) and I can't find any configuration of cards and risers that allows all four of them to work.  I'm stuck at three right now.  With three, the one that isn't working is the one that's plugged into the second x16 slot using an adapter cable.

Yes, I have two other computers that are running Ubuntu booting off a hard drive in a more normal configuration.  Neither of them were trouble-free installation experiences either.  Linuxcoin was actually about on par in terms of time spent getting it set up, and I didn't have to buy another hard drive and optical drive.  Plus, if I had just figured out that damn Gigabyte USB boot incompatibility earlier (or gotten a different mobo), it would've taken much less time.

All right guys, I got Linuxcoin up and running last night after several hours of messing around with it.  I ran into three main problems.  Hopefully my solutions will be helpful to others (and if they are, a token amount to 19hVUo1jEYmo9LW82VcqitwbqLG8o9hReB would be appreciated).

1.  I had to format my USB stick on a Windows computer.  I tried just about everything under the Sun to get it working from my GNU/Linux computer, but all I ever got was "Boot error" when attempting to load the OS on my mining rig.  Incidentally the USB stick booted fine on other computers.  Then I finally came across the following post that resolved my issue: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/237445-30-boot-external

Apparently the BIOS on Gigabyte motherboards kind of sucks, and it doesn't handle boot partitions that aren't in some extremely Windows-specific format, so if you have a Gigabyte motherboard and you're getting "Boot Error", here's what to do.  Stick the USB stick in a GNU/Linux computer and use fdisk to delete all the partitions (yes, you can't use Disk Manager in Windows 7 to do this, although other better partitioning programs probably can).

Then stick it in a Windows computer and use Disk Manager to create a new FAT partition 1 GiB in size.  Then remove the flash stick from the Windows computer, stick it back in your Linux computer, and create a new partition in the remaining space for your persistence volume and format that as ext4.

After all that rigamarole, I loaded the Linuxcoin to the FAT partition using unetbootin on my Linux computer and it finally was able to boot on the Gigabyte motherboard.

2.  Secondly, I got an error after Linuxcoin booted up but before it got to the desktop.  I'm sorry I forget the error now, but it was something about how it couldn't find the live something or other.  The solution was to plug the USB stick into a different port on the motherboard, and then it worked.

3.  Phoenix wouldn't mine even though all of the CLinfo and aticonfig diagnostics indicated that OpenCL was functioning properly.  I was getting the dreaded "FATAL kernel error: Failed to load OpenCL kernel!" error.  The solution ended up being deleting the version of Phoenix that came on the Linuxcoin stick and grabbing the latest trunk from Phoenix's Subversion.  The Phoenix that ships on Linuxcoin is just borked for some reason; go get it on the web like you would if your distro didn't already come with it, and that should fix it.

Hey everyone!  I'm going to try out Linuxcoin tonight and I've been reading through all the helpful posts on here.  I do have one quick question.  I run Ubuntu on my main computer and I've used the usb-creator application to write a CD ISO to a bootable flash drive (including with a persistence partition).  Has anyone had any luck using this same tool to write Linuxcoin to a USB stick, or should I follow the unetbootin instructions?

Two-factor authentication on multiple devices is fine for down the line, but we really need a good solution to encrypt the private components of our ECDSA keypairs right now.  I would implement that PULL as soon as possible (with appropriate modifications) and then move onto additional changes.  Hashing the private keys with a good algorithm will make the standard attack vector of "look for a wallet.dat, send it home" much harder.  The attacker will have to install some kind of keylogger or memory logger and then wait for the next time the user needs to decrypt the private component of the wallet to sign a transaction.  Plus, odds are decent the user may discover their infection in the interim before they ever decrypt their wallet.dat.

As an anecdote, I consider myself a pretty savvy PC user.  Still, back when I was using Windows as a primary OS, I did get a virus once from a shady torrent.  Within a day I immediately realized things were off and completely re-formatted my PC.  Now, pretending that Bitcoin existed back then, encryption of the private key component would've been the difference between me losing all of my bitcoins and not.

The reason it's not a tragedy of the commons is because it's good for Bitcoin.  The more network hashing power Bitcoin has, the more secure the network is, and thus the more viable and safe Bitcoin is.  It's only a "tragedy" if you look at it from the miners' perspective.  If you actually care about all of the other aspects to Bitcoin besides making a quick buck off mining, then the network growing in size is a great thing.

Just to answer the same question in a slightly different way that makes the most intuitive sense to me -- In order to have a blockchain longer than the present blockchain, you would have had to have had MORE average hashing power than the network as a whole.  Here's why -- In the same amount of time (a year or whatever), you would have found more blocks than the current chain; thus, your average difficulty level would've had to have been higher on those found blocks.  You can't find lots of low difficulty blocks really quickly; the Bitcoin client would reject them as invalid because the difficulty level should've been a lot higher.

Nope ...


Correct.  Mining isn't a race.  Other people finding (or not finding) blocks doesn't affect your odds in any way.  In the long run, if you manage to knock out significant mining capacity for a long period of time, then you can affect the difficulty level, which so long as your own mining isn't affected, does mean you will end up mining more in the long run.  However, targeting pools is not a good way to do this, because the individual miners will simply hop between pools as one goes down and you won't affect the hashing rate for very long at all (not long enough to have a big long term effect).