RHEL 6 or Fedora 18 GPU LiteCoin Mining - has anyone gotten it to work?

[bitcoinnix]

Hello Folks,
I'm a decent Linux Sysadmin with a couple years of typical RHEL experience and am pretty comfortable with RHEL 6.  I spent a while trying to get the OpenCL components of your basic CGMiner setup running in RHEL and threw in the towel.

I moved to the mess that Fedora 18 is, because I wanted to stick with something at least partially familiar, and it looks like nobody can even get the darn ATI proprietary drivers running on the Fedora 3.8 kernel - I made a couple runs at it and bombed out each time.

Since the mining efforts for LiteCoin are a bit less popular than Bitcoin right now, the documentation for getting RHEL and Fedora running are thin.

This post is to see if anyone is doing this successfully yet. 

I'm about ready to throw in the towel and spin up a Ubuntu partition though it pains me to do so - I hate running RHEL during the workday and using something else at night.

[FreedomCoin]

hello bitcoinnix,

i am having the same issue with fedora 18, when i try to install the 13.1 ati drivers the system does not reboot back into GUI. I am trying the 12.10 drivers next and going to try to use 32 bit instead of 64.

spent 8 hours yesterday trying to get the 13.1 drivers to work on ubuntu, centos, gentoo and fedora... no go :-/

found this article: sounds like alot are having troubles with ati drivers and 18.

https://ask.fedoraproject.org/question/10924/how-to-install-updated-amd-catalyst-legacy-131/

[LivesUnderTheBridge]

If you're going to use cgiminer, ckolivas suggests running catalyst previous to 13.1.

[FreedomCoin]

ive been trying to use 11.11 from guide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gw7YPYgMgNNU42skibULbJJUx_suP_CpjSEdSi8_z9U/edit

and i cannot get cgminer to run, comes back with syntax and permission errors.... note: this is on ubuntu 12.04 gave up on F18

[bitcoinnix]

ive been trying to use 11.11 from guide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gw7YPYgMgNNU42skibULbJJUx_suP_CpjSEdSi8_z9U/edit

and i cannot get cgminer to run, comes back with syntax and permission errors.... note: this is on ubuntu 12.04 gave up on F18

I also gave up on F18, went with Xubuntu 12.04 and am having a lot of luck. 

I went with older ATI software, 12.8 and 5.4 packages if I recall.

[wndrbr3d]

I'm mining fine in CentOs with 13.2, not EXACTLY RHEL.... But close

[FreedomCoin]

ive been trying to use 11.11 from guide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gw7YPYgMgNNU42skibULbJJUx_suP_CpjSEdSi8_z9U/edit

and i cannot get cgminer to run, comes back with syntax and permission errors.... note: this is on ubuntu 12.04 gave up on F18

I also gave up on F18, went with Xubuntu 12.04 and am having a lot of luck. 

I went with older ATI software, 12.8 and 5.4 packages if I recall.

annoying how only older drivers work with most linux distros....

[bitcoinnix]

I'm mining fine in CentOs with 13.2, not EXACTLY RHEL.... But close

I'd love to know your method and versions used; I was running Scientific Linux 6.3 x86_64 until I needed to start LTC mining.

I remember finding it impossible to find one of the deps, some libcurl-openssl package, for RHEL. 

[gnarcoinguy]

Even when I did finally get the drivers working properly in linux (ubuntu, mint, centos), I still had nothing but massive hardware errors when trying to mine.  Booting the same machine into windows with the same driver set would mine fine though---its all been very confusing but long story short I haven't been able to mine successfully in linux at all so far.  I'd like to hear any success stories out there.

[bitcoinnix]

I'd like to hear any success stories out there.

The majority would have to be success stories - most are on Ubuntu based systems, like what I'm on right now.

Xubuntu 12.04 with the 12.8 drivers work fine for me - I'd just rather be running RHEL since it's what I'm used to at work.

[meltingrobot]

I didn't have much trouble getting cgminer running with ATI on Fedora 18.  I just use the propriety AMD/ATI driver from RPMFusion.  After installing the binary AMD/ATI driver, you still need to install the AMD APP SDK.  I can post up a guide if you guys still need one.

[lucasjkr]

It's been a while since this thread was updated - has anyone determined what software RHEL-based distro's need to be able to mine Litecoin?

I'm able to mine away on a few Windows boxes no problem, but my main machien at home runs Centos 6.4 - i have no problem GPU mining Bitcoin with it, but haven't had any luck using my GPU to mine Litecoins. Any advice/pointers would be appreciated.

[Stramash]

Got cgminer 3.7.2 mining LiteCoin on Fedora 19 following this http://servertoast.com/2013/07/17/compiling-cgminer-on-fedora-19-with-amd-catalyst-drivers/ except I installed the drivers using the latest official AMD installer with default options.

Initially had hardware errors until checking the cgminer SCRYPT-README and entering:

Code:

export GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100
export GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS=1

[markm]

I used to have some problems quite a while back with Fedora 17 but for a long time now akmod-catalyst has behaved nicely.

Recently I started upgrading some of my machines to Fedora 19, on one of them I seemed to have trouble with akmod-catalyst so used kmod-catalyst. Then used kmod-catalyst on another machine since it seemed to work. But after an upgrade yesterday that second machine didn't get the right moduel loaded so I installed akmod-catalyst and rebooted and it worked. So likely the first machine will want to go back to my usual choice, akmod-catalyst, instead of sticking with kmod-catalyst.

From the sound of it maybe I am lucky that I loitered so long on Fedora 17 - past its lifetime - and went straight on to 19.

I gave up long long ago on the drivers direct from the manufacturer though, as soon as I had akmod-catalyst working long ago I soon learned to stick with it even though sometimes if I happen to upgrade at the moment when there is a new kernel but not yet a new akmod-catalyst to match it I had to boot back to the previous kernel.

I did find with scrypt though that my 5870's that would get 400 to 407 or so gigahashes on SHA would not get similar number of kilohashes on scrypt, even messing with the clocks to optimise them the way scrypt likes them instead of the way SHA likes them. I'd get only about 250 Khashes from them.

Thats a lot of why I keep hoping for scrypt FPGA units, I am sick of the fiddling around with GPUs and the seemingly poor scrypt efficiency of GPUs in Fedora.

-MarkM-