mining option on all the client software

[renodaret]

does the mining that is built into all the qt clients actually work? what needs to be done to make it work? i would like to try solo mining, but having truoble using a laptop to do it.

[Foxpup]

It works, all you have to do is run Bitcoin-Qt with the -gen command line option. It just doesn't work well. It uses only your CPU, which is ludicrously inefficient. Assuming you have a very fast CPU, it is likely to take nearly a century of constant mining to find a block this way (unless you're unlucky, in which case it might take several centuries). The only reason this option still exists at all is because the Satoshi client is required to have all the functionality required to run the network (including mining), so that other developers can see how it works.