ubuntu-10.04-netbook-i386.iso - bitcoin-0.5.0 not working together

[Confounded Bridge]

Looking for some uber who is trolling the Newbie section to help me out - hopefully.

I am new to Ubuntu and to bitcoin so basically i don't know dick.

I recently started using my old notebook with the Ubuntu OS 10.04. so i could use bitcoin safely.
I ran the OS from a CD and had bitcoin on a usb drive. all worked perfectly.
I loaded the Os to the hard drive because of a tiny ram issue - was tired of the comp freezing. 
loaded bitcoin to download folder and got it to run fine from the 32 folder.
got a wallet and figured everything was cool. Well I did the stupid thing and clicked on the OS update deal and
after my notebook had all of it's nice new shiny update files installed bitcoin quit working. That was bitcoin v.0.4 something.
Days ago they came out with v. 0.5.

In the meantime after saving the wallet.dat - blk0001.dat and the blkindex.dat files. i wiped the mem and hard drive of
the notebook and reinstalled the ubuntu 10.04 without the updates and the new bitcoin v. 0.5.

Is there something up with the new bitcoin v. 0.5 because it works sort of. I went to the appropriate 32 folder and double clicked
on the the icon. I know it opened and loaded the bitcoin program because i can see it in the main folder as a hidden file.
the bitcoin program will not open on my " desktop " ( windows jargon ).

can anyone explain if i need to ammend any files or install something else?

thanks in advance for your help.

and i did search this forum for notebook - v. 0.5 and other stuff first so i could try to find the answer myself.

[Confounded Bridge]

Should this be on a Ubuntu forum somewhere?

[paraipan]

probably you are missing some dependencies, it happens allot in linux

make sure you add the new ppa with "sudo apt-add-repository ppa:bitcoin/bitcoin" then do "sudo apt-get update" and install bitcoin with
"sudo apt-get install bitcoin-qt".
That's all

[Confounded Bridge]

Thanks for the reply.

I did look at that but it didn't look like a group effort. Just looked like one lone guys personal app.
U really think that's safe? just asking....

i meant to say i have seen that advice all over but all from same guy and is his app.

[paraipan]

Thanks for the reply.

I did look at that but it didn't look like a group effort. Just looked like one lone guys personal app.
U really think that's safe? just asking....

i meant to say i have seen that advice all over but all from same guy and is his app.

i don't really understand what you're saying, if you refer to the ppa (repository) then yes it's the good one

https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin

[Confounded Bridge]

Well Hmmm.

I completely understand what you are saying. The PPA is listed on the Bitcoin.org website as one of the downloads so obviously
they think that is a viable download. That being said.

I am getting into Bitcoins for a number of reasons...:
I consider it to be just as good and actually better than the printed United States Federal Reserve notes that I use every day.
The Federal Reserve is as about as federal as federal express.
It is a privately owned central bank that at the moment is unregulated by the U.S. Government.
The Federal reserve Prints is't Monopoly money out of thin air and charges us interest on it through the I.R.S..
It is not backed by gold or silver
The U.S. dollar is being devalued every time the fed prints more of its funny money because there is nothing backing it.

At least there is a set amount of bitcoin and we - the people using it don't have to pay interest on it to any central bank fat cats.
I find it to be more real than U.S. currency in it's current state.

Well enough of my rant.

It just bothers me that I am turning my new wallet over to one person " Matt Corallo " who has written all of the PPA code, which i cannot read by the way, that has been uploaded in the past few months. His PPA is only a couple months old. As far as i can tell it is completely under his control on a different website other than bitcoin.org. There is no documented peer review and could possibly be changed via update etc. at any time. I just find the whole deal to be highly dubious and onerous. One unknown person shouldn't be theoretically in control of other peoples funds whether imagined or real.

So I guess what I am asking for is an alternative fix from the bitcoin team and not from some guy that could possibly access my wallet at a later date.

This new PPA doesn't bother anyone else? am I paranoid? LOL.

[P4man]

Some packages were renamed from ubuntu 10.04 to ubuntu 11.x. I recall you had to create a symlink to make bitcoin 0.4 work on the latest ubuntu releases, I guess they now follow the new naming scheme meaning you would have to create that symlink for older ubuntu releases. I dont recall exactly what it was you had to link.

Just try starting bitcoin client from a terminal and copy/paste the error message here, that should give us a good idea of whats happening.

[Confounded Bridge]

switched back to bitcoin v.0.4 and reinstalled old wallet etc.


#1

EXCEPTION :11DbException
Db::open Invalid argument
bitcoin in Applnit ( )

#2

EXCEPTION : 11DbException
Db::open: invalid argument
bitcoin in CMyApp:: On Unhandled Exception ( )

[P4man]

Looks like a problem with the block chain database. Same problem as here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=30729.0

On ubuntu, those files are stored in ~/.bitcoin
Try deleting everything there except your wallet.dat and redownload the blockchain.

Also, if the wallet.dat was encrypted with 0.5, I suspect 0.4 might not be able to read it, so do the above using 0.5.

[Confounded Bridge]

Looks like a problem with the block chain database. Same problem as here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=30729.0

On ubuntu, those files are stored in ~/.bitcoin
Try deleting everything there except your wallet.dat and redownload the blockchain.

Also, if the wallet.dat was encrypted with 0.5, I suspect 0.4 might not be able to read it, so do the above using 0.5.

Thanks very much. Replacing the ( wallet.dat file only ) worked way better than replacing all 3 files. That wallet file was v.0.4 that I had
backed up initially. works great and I have my wallet back. Pretty happy I didn't lose the $150.00.
I am downloading the blocks as I type this.

U rock P4man  

On a side note:
 I did try doing what paraipan suggested - after I had deleted my wallet dat. file and loaded the version 0.5 bitcoin program.
It didn't work but that isn't necessarily the programs fault as by that time I had changed so many settings that it prolly was doomed to fail anyways. LOL.

Anyway, something happened that I feel people need to know about;
I had deleted my original wallet.dat  file and loaded a new one off 0.5.
Then I did "sudo apt-add-repository ppa:bitcoin/bitcoin" then do "sudo apt-get update" and install bitcoin with
"sudo apt-get install bitcoin-qt" that paraipan suggested.
That didn't work so I decided to go back to original Ubuntu laptop install. I rebooted with .iso disk and it wouldn't reformat and do fresh install. Hmmm.
I pulled out Ubuntu.iso disk and threw in a Derick's boot and nuke I have laying around. I nuked the hard drive and got a very strange message at the end of the procedure. "your disk has bad sectors".
Well I know for a fact the disk is good cause I checked before I started all this. Hmmm .... a chance that that would be a newly installed
ppa file that can't be overwritten?
I pulled out the Derick's disk and threw in a memtest86 disk to wipe the memory rebooted and ran the Derick's boot and nuke again.
WOW...what a surprise - my hard drive " bad sectors " dissapeared.

Like I said before I cant read code and the last programing I did was Fortran in junior high.
There might be a rat in that ppa woodpile. beware.

Anyways thanks again P4man  

[P4man]

ew, lots of misunderstandings there.
Lets start with the most important one, the bad sectors. This is usually bad news. Bad sectors do not disappear, but they do get remapped to spare sectors automatically by the drive itself at the moment you try to write to them. Thats most likely what happened when you "nuked" the drive, all it does is write random data to each and every sector, which triggers the drive's controller to remap the known bad sectors to spare ones.

Check your drive health. In ubuntu, launch "disk utility", select your drive, and check out the "smart status". I got a strong suspicion its dying and the cause of your trouble to begin with.

Also make a copy of you wallet.dat thats not stored on your harddrive, but some external media (good idea to encrypt the file too).

[Confounded Bridge]

oki doke:

system/disk utility/local storage/toshiba 60gb hard disk/ smart data:

1) read error rate green - good
2) throughput green - good
3) spinup green - good
4) start stop  green good
5) reallocate green - good
dude ima not even gonna type the rest - it's too long.
either green or n/a

had a few beers sorry

What am i suppose to be looking for anyways?

[Confounded Bridge]

ohh yea i forgot to say that when this was still a windows comp i did check the hdd wit a program and said was ok.
forget atm which one but have it somewhere. there were no bad sectors a couple days ago so idk why now?
anyways i have the original wallet in v.0.4 and as soon as i finish downloading all of the blocks i will make a spare to disk of all 3 pertinent files as i did before. 

i don't see anything wrong with hard drive and i really don't feel like wiping and reloading windows to find out if it is.As far as i can tell this one says its ok - what are all the n/a's?

like i said i recovered my $150.00 so atm all cool.     J.K. (just kidding)

thanks again for the wonderful help in getting back my wallet. 
cheers

[P4man]

What am i suppose to be looking for anyways?

You should look for bad sector count or relocated sector count (post the numbers) or anything else thats not green or good. Dont worry about N/A it means not applicable, iow, your drive doesnt support that particular parameter

[Confounded Bridge]

i do not see a bad sector count on this utility

reallocated sector count is: did u mean this?
green good
normalised: 100
worst         100
threshold     50
value          0 sectors

everything else is green or black n/a

[Confounded Bridge]

Instead of all this foolishness upgrade to a modern disto that has actual hope in hell of running the client.

Did U even read the thread? Everything is working fine and I have my wallet back.
I have tried other " newest Linux distro's " and they wouldn't even load to my dinosaur laptop.
10.04 is what works on it so that's what I am stuck with. So take a foolishness chill pill dude.

It would be really cool if bitcoin v 0.5 would work with the distro I have without having to load some errant guys PPA.
That way I wouldn't have to sacrifice security for useability.

I am using a windows desktop comp to type this and it has bitcoin v.0.5 on it and it works great - not that I would ever use the wallet to ever transfer money on this machine with the windows OS on it. LOL

Anyways;

Peace out

[P4man]

If you dont trust the PPA, compile yourself.  Try this

Code:

wget -O- https://nodeload.github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/tarball/v0.5.0rc1|tar zxv&&cd bitcoin-bitcoin-398049e&&\
sudo apt-get install libssl-dev qt4-qmake libqt4-dev $(apt-cache search libdb|cut -d' ' -f1|egrep '\..\+\+-dev'|tail -1) \
libboost-system-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-program-options-dev libboost-thread-dev&&\
qmake .&& make -j$(cat /proc/cpuinfo |egrep ^processor|wc -l)

Instructions courtesy of DiThi

[Confounded Bridge]

SAC

I think that the second sentence at the top of the page said it all - " I am new to Ubuntu and to bitcoin so basically i don't know dick. "
This is like the first week that I have ever used Linux and have been trying to read and learn as much as I can about it.
When I downloaded the OS updates Bitcoin v0.4 quit working, tried the new bitcoin v.0.5 and no go.

If you can be helpful and suggest a " distro " that will work on my Hp pavilion ze5185 that would be greatly appreciated.
I tried to load the newest: Ubuntu, Mint etc. 4 or 5 in all - don't recall. The .iso's wouldn't even load to this laptop.

Anyways;
Thanks for the help P4man

 

[P4man]

Does that laptop have only 512 MB Ram? If so, newer live cds wont work because you do not have enough ram to load the ISO and the OS. You need at least 1GB for that.  But you can install ubuntu 11.10, you just need the non graphical "alternate" cd. Grab it here:

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/alternative-download#alternate

Its only the installer thats not graphical, once installed you have the same OS and GUI. Dont expect uber smooth performance, but it will probably work.