Nvidia GPU mining on RHEL6

[Raghnar]

Hi everyone,
I followed the bitcoin project for a little bit, intrigued by its implication and P2P economic vision, and now wanted to start mining (not for making real profit, mostly for learning purposes).

My PC at the University, that I want to use mostly, is an i5 with 8800 GTS with mounted CentOS 6.2
I tampered with it for more than the whole morning not being able to running GPU mining with cgminer.

Of cgminer
There is the repo version 1.6.2 that is compiled without GPU predisposition, and is working just fine.
I download the tarball installer of the latest 2.7.5 version, but while configuring the compilation it exit with the following error:

  OpenCL...............: NOT FOUND. GPU mining support DISABLED

I'm pretty sure that I've OpenCL installed (in /usr/lib64/nvidia/ there are some libcuda.so and some libOpenCL.so), I tried to hardlink with LDFLAGS=-L/usr/lib64/nvidia but without results...
any comments or suggestions?

Do anyone know if the is the intention of baking a repo version for RHEL6 with GPU support?

[DonShrents]

For Nvidia mining, from experience, Ufasoft's miner is by far the best solution. I have tried both cgminer and Ufasoft for all ATI and Nvidia cards and always found Ufasoft to be better for Nvidia based cards, whereas I find cgminer much better for ATI cards, as that is what it is constantly tuned for.

Although not recommended, if you are forced to use an Nvidia card, you should give Ufasoft a try as you will propably be happier with the results.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3486.0

~DonShrents

[Raghnar]

trying to install the necessary cuda libs... maybe I can get over the problems with cgminer too!
Thank you for your suggestion Donshrents

[DonShrents]

Actually, after having a look at the Bitcoin Wiki for Mining Hardware specs etc, (which you should also do prior to wasting any more time) it looks like only a severely overclocked 8800 GTS is even capable of breaking the 20 MH/s mark.

I realize that this might simply be a learning tool for you, but in the end, you will be wasting your time.

You should have a look at this Wiki Page to get more information about your card capabilities and the capabilities of others by comparison:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

Nvidia cards are simply not an effective mining tool any longer and haven't been for well over 1 year now, when even prior to that, were barely effective to begin with.

~DonShrents

[Raghnar]

Well I can always change cards...
In any case at home I have a 4850 that get 75 Mh/s undervolted.

Just being able to configure correctly understanding what to do and so on will gave me insight on graphic card setting in RH6, and GPU-driven calculations in general.
In any case I will soon make some consideration about this economic experiment of mine... e.g. the concept behind this mining difficulties, and so on... (what is the general aim of a currency that let only the most powerful computer mining for coins instead e.g. putting a floor to the computational power connected to an IP and such?)

[DonShrents]

I think that the community in general mostly support Debian-based distros and Ubuntu seems to be the most popular flavor of choice.
I haven't stumbled across many Red Hat specific miners, unless it's possible to compile your own for RH.
Unfortunately, I know very little about Linux and even less about compiling specific versions of miners for alternate distros.
Looks like you will learn more than you anticipated.
Have fun.

~DonShrents