GUI mining - updated Dec 3 with 7970 bugfix, also supports Stratum!

[Kiv]

Working OK for me also so far. 

I only have a Cuda/OpenCL capable 9600GT w/1GB vram in an AMD X2 box running Win7. Any extra flags needed? Terminal only shows -server flag as far as I can tell.  GPU only crunching 16.4 Mhash/s but that's much better than the CPU's 1460 Khash/s!

Also status area shows "Difficulty 1 hashes:33". Can anyone tell me what this means?

Thanks for any tips and I'm happy to contribute to this project as a hobby for now!

P.S...I also need the developers BitCoin address so I can donate after I purchase or create some BTC. Edit: I found the address under his first post.

You can look here to see what different GPUs are capable of. Poclbm is slightly faster than the numbers in that chart, so 16 Mhash is right on target.

"Difficulty 1 hashes" are hashes that nearly solved the block, but weren't quite good enough. You can think of generating coins as a lottery where you buy tickets and you win if the number matches the winning number. Difficulty 1 hash means that your number was really close to the winning number, but you didn't win. It's just shown to give you an idea of how many tries your GPU has made, and so you can say "ohhh, I was only off by one number, maybe I'll win next time"

I appreciate any donations, so far I have made a whole... 2 BTC, haha.

[Fuma]

Great little Gui. Thank you !

used it in a pool and it worked great.
but i cant seem to solo mine. i keep getting rpc connect error.
the user and password word is right.
what am i missing?

[m0mchil]

"Difficulty 1 hashes" are hashes that nearly solved the block...

Just to clarify - these would be winning hashes if difficulty is 1. Exactly equivalent to slush's pool shares.

[KX2]

Difficulty 1 hash means that your number was really close to the winning number, but you didn't win. It's just shown to give you an idea of how many tries your GPU has made, and so you can say "ohhh, I was only off by one number, maybe I'll win next time"

Sounds like the story of my life!

I did fire up RivaTuner and it boosted the card up to 18.0 Mhash/s from 16.4 Mhash/s. I can't seem to find any 5970 GPU over here in Sweden. Will research a close alternative card.

Also, looks like the slush pool is closed at this time. Any recommendations of another good pool?

Thanks and here's a small tip of 0.05 until I purchase or create some more! 

[dishwara]

CUTE. thats the only word i can use to describe it.
A long time wait for a gui miner is done by you.
Thanks a lot for that.
I just saw it & downloaded & mining. coz its very very very simple.

Even though terminal window is ugly, but it is useful, so please in tab or even have extra option to turn on/off terminal window.
Since u use tabs , if a 4 * 5970, can be run in just 4 tabs with ur cute gui. so a lot of free space in display & terminal can use that, instead of tabbing terminal, as we have to click every time to see whats in terminal tab.
Terminal have to be separate.

[dishwara]

2) Make it as single executable file. Extracting zip is annoying and also many people don't have support for 7z.

I can't accept this. as already kiv said , he has problem with single installation file.
Why many people don't have 7z support ?
Its an open source compression program which is free. people wont download a 2MB application to extract, & mine in GUI than stressing with cmd prompt?

http://www.7-zip.org/download.html

It has support for almost all OS.
from windows, linux..to

p7zip for Debian (and Ubuntu)
p7zip for Fedora Core
p7zip for Gentoo
p7zip for AltLinux.org
p7zip for FreeBSD
p7zip for Mac OS X
EZ 7z for Mac OS X
7zX for Mac OS X
keka - the free Mac OS X file archiver
p7zip for BeOS
p7zip for DOS / DJGPP
p7zip for Amiga
p7zip for Solaris
7-Zip for other systems:

7-Zip Extracter for WinCE


Try it. I am personally using 7zip & winrar for more than 2 years & winrar is evaluation version.
And in my knowledge, any program extract correctly, only if u need to create compressed file, u need good compressor. so for decompressing 7zip is far better than BULKY winzip.

[error]

7-zip definitely wins on size. I took some random files I had laying around and compressed them with various utilities:

Code:

-rw-rw-r--.  1 error error 10590437 Feb 27 10:30 test.tar.lzo
-rw-rw-r--.  1 error error 10022137 Feb 27 10:23 test.tar.gz
-rw-rw-r--.  1 error error 10010959 Feb 27 10:23 test.zip
-rw-rw-r--.  1 error error  9458886 Feb 27 10:26 test.rar
-rw-rw-r--.  1 error error  9066012 Feb 27 10:23 test.tar.bz2
-rw-rw-r--.  1 error error  7997221 Feb 27 10:23 test.7z

YMMV.

[slush]

I can't accept this. as already kiv said , he has problem with single installation file.
Why many people don't have 7z support ?
Its an open source compression program which is free. people wont download a 2MB application to extract, & mine in GUI than stressing with cmd prompt?

Why I have to install other non relevant stuff on my computer for retrieving some application? Who cares about compression ratio in times of cable (or faster) internet connection? Downloading the file in EXE is much better and easier, if your concern is to give best user experience. And if somebody don't want to provide EXE, ZIP is much better choice.

The most of users don't care if the compression tool is or isn't opensource. But they have to install it to get poclbm GUI, it's one step more for no reason.

[dishwara]

I can't accept this. as already kiv said , he has problem with single installation file.
Why many people don't have 7z support ?
Its an open source compression program which is free. people wont download a 2MB application to extract, & mine in GUI than stressing with cmd prompt?

Why I have to install other non relevant stuff on my computer for retrieving some application? Who cares about compression ratio in times of cable (or faster) internet connection? Downloading the file in EXE is much better and easier, if your concern is to give best user experience. And if somebody don't want to provide EXE, ZIP is much better choice.

The most of users don't care if the compression tool is or isn't opensource. But they have to install it to get poclbm GUI, it's one step more for no reason.

Installing an application requires at least 3-5 clicks as ok's & Next's...& extract is just one click & one step.

[slush]

Installing an application requires at least 3-5 clicks as ok's & Next's...& extract is just one click & one step.

The point is that those steps are unnecessary. You also assume that user knows what to do with .7z extension. I believe the most of users (users, not geeks like us) don't know that.

My Firefox says "You choose to open file .... which us '7z file'". OK, I have to go to google what 7z file is, open site, download, install, then go back to firefox and try it again. ZIP is widely used from times of WinXP, all browsers (even IE!) will offer to open zip files directly.

That's all, I don't plan to troll here more than this .

[Kiv]

Maybe a simple installer would be better than either 7zip or single file. Non-technical users are used to clicking through an installer and creating a shortcut on their Start Menu/Desktop, so doing the familiar thing might be best. With single file executables I've seen people delete the executable and think they are just deleting a shortcut

And maybe the installer will use 7zip internally, for the best of both worlds.

That's all, I don't plan to troll here more than this .

I do appreciate you bring up usability things. I think Bitcoin has a long way to go for usability in general before "normal" people are comfortable with it, so I'd like to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem

[slush]

Maybe a simple installer would be better than either 7zip or single file. Non-technical users are used to clicking through an installer and creating a shortcut on their Start Menu/Desktop, so doing the familiar thing might be best. With single file executables I've seen people delete the executable and think they are just deleting a shortcut

And maybe the installer will use 7zip internally, for the best of both worlds.

NSIS works with py2exe pretty nicely. And - oh well - it uses 7zip internally!

[KX2]

I personally enjoy geeky stuff like .7z and would love to run BitCoin on my OpenBSD box if Nvidia or ATI drivers were available for the OS. But a good rule of thumb is to use the KISS principle - "Keep It Simple Stupid".

The .exe installer for Windows gets my vote!

[Kiv]

A new version of the miner is available; I've updated the download link on the first post, or you can get it here:

    poclbm-gui-20110227.7z

Changes since the last version:

- The console window is hidden by default. It can be shown in its own tab using Help -> Show Console. Log messages are also redirected to 'guiminer.log' in the executable directory if you want to look at them after.

- Clicking "X" minimizes the miner to the system tray instead of closing it; this matches the behavior of the official Bitcoin client. You can quit the program by File -> Quit or right-clicking the tray icon and clicking "Close".

- Tooltips appear when you hover on the text entry fields.

- Tabs are hidden if only a single miner is open.


I will look into the .exe installer over the next week, future releases should have both installer and 7z packages.

[KX2]

Thanks for the update Kiv! Glad to see my 0.05 donation was not wasted! 

[JWU42]

Great work - donation coming your way for sure!

[slush]

Just tested newest version and I really like it. Few extra feature requests:

a) Remember the last mining state. If I shutdown the application while mining is ON, it should start mining immediately after next start.
b) Add possibility to start application on Windows startup.

Then, with single exe installer, it will be absolutely perfect :-).

[theGECK]

Small donation made, and slight oddity to report.

Upon a computer crash, the only thing left in the folder where I extracted the GUI program was the tcl folder. The rest was gone. When running the shortcut that I had on my desktop, it would bring up a command window, and then report that no OpenCL devices were detected. I downloaded the newest version (nice improvements, btw) and it's working fine now. Probably just something related to the crash, but figured I'd put it here in case it happens to anybody else.

[new_in_this]

Hi.

This is really noobie question:

1: I DL and install Bitcoin (made portforwarding)
2: I DL this miner app
3: I open guiminer.exe
4: I make solo pass and set path correctly
5: I create new miner
6: I set all details (localhost, user and pw using port 8332)
7: On guiminer i launch Bitcoin client (and wait it to start and do all downloading)
8: On guiminer solo i press Start mining


Is that all i need to do for attemting to get Bitcoins? Is it correctly working and do i need to set Extra flags?

That's all i can think of now, but maybe more questions later when i understand this better.

EDIT: i'm not sure did i understood fully, but when this guiminer is running using my GPU, should i enable Generate Coins option in bitcoin client?

[dishwara]

in device ,  u see how many by clicking down arrow?

• ******
[1]  *****
?