Need help getting started

[MichaelxBee]

Hello everyone!

I received my first miner today, a GekkoScience USB miner. Long story short, after spending the entire day trying to begin mining, I think I'm pretty lost.

I downloaded cgminer (the full package) from Spaceman, which i believe is version 4.3.3

I created a bitcoin.conf plain text file as follows:
server=1
rpcuser=Michael
rpcpassword= xxxx
rpctimeout=30
rpcallowip=127.0.0.1
rpcport=8332

I could not find any wallets that could run on my current software, Mac OS X 10.6.8, so I downloaded Mycelium on my phone, and got the wallet address

As luck would have it, I cannot download Bitcoin Core which happens to require OS X 10.7+, so I downloaded bitcoin 0.10.1 from the main Bitcoin site

I've run cgminer and when the command line prompt came up, I entered the following:
-o http://127.0.0.1:8332 -u Michael -p xxxx --btc-address xxxx

Then I'll get some errors saying things such as "waiting for USB hot plug", "no device detected", "pool 0 seems to be slow or down"

I suppose what I'm trying to do here is solo mine. I realize that's not the best course of action, but I'd like to give it a shot.

If anyone can offer any insight, I'd sincerely appreciate it.

[-ck]

The version of cgminer you are using is very old and even if you had the latest you still wouldn't be able to mine with it as the gekkoscience hardware needs a custom forked version of cgminer to work. Here is the support thread for that device:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1173963.0

You also cannot mine solo unless you have the full bitcoin core client so you'd need to either find a way to get that working on your hardware or mine on a pool instead.