Armory 0.96 on Debian Stretch

[geomule]

Hi folks,

appears that Armory is not in the official stable realease of Debian. While I accept that being a python programme, the Ubuntu package on https://www.bitcoinarmory.com/ will do the job. However, I've not found a decent installation step by step guide for Debain stretch. Once downloaded the deb from bitcoinarmory, and verfied the signature, how do I go about installing the dependencies via apt-get? I'm not a fan of using pip3, as I'm not a developer and everytime i use pip3 I destroy my python installation on my system due to the conflicts that are created with libs with apt-get.

Anyone aware of a decent step by step guide?

Thanks

[PhoenixFire]

Hi folks,

appears that Armory is not in the official stable realease of Debian. While I accept that being a python programme, the Ubuntu package on https://www.bitcoinarmory.com/ will do the job. However, I've not found a decent installation step by step guide for Debain stretch. Once downloaded the deb from bitcoinarmory, and verfied the signature, how do I go about installing the dependencies via apt-get? I'm not a fan of using pip3, as I'm not a developer and everytime i use pip3 I destroy my python installation on my system due to the conflicts that are created with libs with apt-get.

Anyone aware of a decent step by step guide?

Thanks

Step 1: Don't use bitcoinarmory.com

https://btcarmory.com/ or https://github.com/goatpig/BitcoinArmory/releases
You probably want armory_0.96.4_amd64_gcc4.7_noasm.deb
On Stretch, you'll need a bunch of qt4 dependencies too.

[geomule]

Cool, thanks for your reply PhoenixFire. In fact I only had one dependancy. But I have a few more questions.

Question 1: what are the relationships between all those websites?

QUestion 2: where do i get a dam good newbie guide for armory? I've started it up. It asked for creating a wallet and I skipped. It asked to use armory as default for running bitcoin and I accepted. Now its "offline", appears to be doing something with "Prparing Database" and "Scan Transaction History" althought the bars are not progressing.In fact, there is absolutely no traffic being generated over my network card. Is armory meant to be downloading the bitcoin blockchain? Do I need to install the core bitcoin software and if so, what version and where do I get it for Debian Stretch?

Regards

[HCP]

Answer 1:
bitcoinarmory.com was the "original" Armory website. However, due to a somewhat unfortunate series of events, the old "company" that was responsible for Bitcoin Armory had some issues and effectively stopped development.

The code was "open source" so was picked up by goatpig. However all the existing site and servers etc were not able to be used... so goatpig set up www.btcarmory.com and also started using his github to host the release files etc.


Answer 2:
You will need to have Bitcoin Core downloaded, installed and fully synced to use Bitcoin Armory properly.

Go here: https://bitcoincore.org/en/download/

You'll be able to find the version for your operating system. Get version 0.16.0.

[geomule]

You will need to have Bitcoin Core downloaded, installed and fully synced to use Bitcoin Armory properly.

Go here: https://bitcoincore.org/en/download/

Ok, so I downloaded bitcoin core, verified, installed, and spent the last 2 days downloading the whole database. The bitcoin core now seems happy. However, when I start Armory, it says its "preparing the databses" and "Scaning transaction history". It pretty much hangs on this screen. I told it where the binary of bticoin core is located under "settings", I added the path /home/user/.armory/bitcoin-0.16.0/bin under the "bitcoin install dir" and "/mnt/sdb3/user/.bitcoin" for the "bitcoin home dir". I had to download the bitcoing database on another partition  of another disk as I was running out of space on the main disk.

is the "bitcoin install dir" where the database is and "bitcoin home dir" is where the binaries are?

Thanks

[PhoenixFire]

Ok, so I downloaded bitcoin core, verified, installed, and spent the last 2 days downloading the whole database. The bitcoin core now seems happy. However, when I start Armory, it says its "preparing the databses" and "Scaning transaction history". It pretty much hangs on this screen. I told it where the binary of bticoin core is located under "settings", I added the path /home/user/.armory/bitcoin-0.16.0/bin under the "bitcoin install dir" and "/mnt/sdb3/user/.bitcoin" for the "bitcoin home dir". I had to download the bitcoing database on another partition  of another disk as I was running out of space on the main disk.

is the "bitcoin install dir" where the database is and "bitcoin home dir" is where the binaries are?

Thanks

"Bitcoin Install Dir" is where the binaries are and "Bitcoin Home Dir" is where the bitcoin blockchain has downloaded to. The latter will contain the blocks & chainstate directories (and more).

Going on your initial description above, I think you have it set up correctly.
Unfortunately allowing Armory to manage bitcoind/bitcoin core can be unreliable - tend to recommend running things manually, but this requires config files/cli args to be set up too.
Regardless of whether Armory is set to spin up Bitcoin Core for you, Armory has to maintain its own database and must read and index the blockchain itself to do so; depending on your machine's specs it could need to spend a while preparing the database and scanning for transactions. Initial scans take a while but Armory won't take very long to catch up if you are a few days out of date.

There will be several log files in /home/user/.armory/ (unless linux handles it differently) that you'll want to check to make sure Armory is actually doing something useful.  dbLog.txt should have some entries that end with "parsed block file #N", but an increasing integer instead of N. armorylog.txt is important too.
Those two logs are those most commonly asked for when troubleshooting - you're welcome to post them to pastebin or another similar service if you need some help.