Opening Bitcoin-qt to import private keys

[Rygon]

I'm probably doing something obviously wrong, but I'm just trying to open up bitcoin-qt in Linux Ubuntu so that I can use the importprivkey option and lock a wallet file. I'm using the 0.8 version. In the older versions, this used to be accomplished with "bitcoin-qt server=1" command, then there would be options which included being able to enter a passphrase, and opening up the debug windown (to import, export, etc in a friendly way). I try that option with the 0.8 version and it just opens up bitcoin-qt regularly.

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[Rygon]

Basically, I'm asking how to use the JSON-RPC API, because I can't figure it out.

This should be in technical support, sorry!

[Rygon]

Help->Debug Window. Click the Console tab in the dialog that pops up.

When I run bitcoin-qt, there are no menus, such as the help menu. That's what I'm trying to show up.

[deepceleron]

It's a Ubuntu Unity GUI bug, the standard menu location was moved to the top of the screen in all applications by Canonical. They don't intercept Qt menus consistently with their Gnome mods. Developers of apps like Firefox have made patches to compensate for Unity suckage. Apparently the menu might occasionally come back if you minimize/maximize a few times or close and restart.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/1242


The server=1 command only turns on the RPC server (you also need a rpcuser/rpcpassword options in bitcoin.conf for it to work). It will still launch the Qt GUI if you are running bitcoin-qt.

You can open a console window when Bitcoin is running and access bitcoind to do your RPC work:

./bitcoind help

[Rygon]

Thanks, I just thought it was a difference between 7.2 and 8.0, or something. I ended up just doing it all through the terminal with bitcoind functions anyways. It was just less conventient.