http://www.linuxmint.com/I haven't seen anyone on here using Linux Mint 10 for their mining operations so I figured I would let you guys know why I use Mint and what I did to mint to make it work better. First of all Linux Mint was based on Ubuntu but there is also a Debian version being forked as well. Mint is a pretty small distribution considering what it comes with.
From their homepage:
Started in 2006, Linux Mint is now the 4th most widely used home operating system behind Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS and Canonical's Ubuntu.
Mint is a very safe and reliable distribution to use and plugs holes that Ubuntu developers never did. You can easily deploy the installation in a few clicks from a LiveCD and you can install ATi and Nvidia drivers very easily without having to mess around with Xorg and conf files most of the time. For the average user Linux Mint is great. For the advanced user it puts everything in your hand to build a very powerful platform to launch bitcoin mining rigs from. I have my custom built distribution on a 1GB USB key and I can deploy the miner in a little less than 10 minutes (most of that time is spent installing the software to a HDD).
But there were a few issues with Mint that I had correct before I could use it the way I wanted to. I have created my own installation version of Mint that comes with all of the packages required to run a bitcoin mining operation. I've hardened the distribution and secured SSH more among other things I've updated Mint to use the latest ATi drivers as well as modifications to the Gnome desktop which was causing problems with over clocked cards.
I've also written startup scripts which launches Xorg and then the miner from bootup. A cronjob that monitors the miners and tries to fix the miner if it is failing and if not simply reboots the system which usually solves problems when Xorg locks up because of overclocking.
I've also written some monitoring scripts which is also packaged in the distribution.
With LinuxCoin I am not sure if there is any need to release yet another distribution supporting Bitcoin but considering all the newbies trying to get LinuxCoin and Ubuntu to work I figured this could be another option. Not sure yet.
Example Putty screen grab from running my ./tempcheck.sh script. I have pooled these together and dump data out to a central location for internal web browsing of logs. I've been working on an email notifier for the miners the past few days.
I'd be happy to share my package logs and built binaries with the n00bs.
vince@NODE1 ~ $ ./tempcheck.sh
Local External Environment:
Air Temperature: 19 C
Humidity: 49%
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Machine Environment:
Operating System: Linux Mint 10 Julia
Current Date: Fri Jun 24 12:26:30 ADT 2011
Host: NODE1 192.168.1.xxx
Uptime: 12:26:30 up 2 days, 1:37, 3 users, load average: 0.27, 0.18, 0.10
Processor: AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 955 Processor @ 3200 MHZ
PCIe Bus Temp: 35 C
CPU Temp: 40 C
HDD Temp: 38 C
ATi 6870 Temp: 76 C
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Current Mining Stats:
xxx:8332 24/06/2011 12:24:21, 7fdf204b, accepted
xxx:8332 24/06/2011 12:24:34, 8a9fd718, accepted
xxx::8332 24/06/2011 12:24:41, 069c83fe, accepted
xxx::8332 24/06/2011 12:24:45, ee4948c1, accepted
pit.deepbit.net:8332 284311 khash/s
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