Ubuntu Natty Narwhal 11.04 & Oneiric Ocelot 11.10 Mining Guide / HOWTO

[Inaba]

You can use this guide with this mining pool perfectly: https://eclipsemc.com

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This guide is for the 64 Bit version of Ubuntu.  You really shouldn't be running the 32 bit version anymore. It's time to move on.
Install Ubuntu Natty Narwhal v11.04 x64 or Oneiric Ocelot v11.10 x64.  Select defaults for most everything.  The default Oneiric install has some wonky default partition mapping.  It's fine for a hard drive, but if you are installing on a USB stick that is less than 8GB, you may want to reconfigure the partition mapping.  Even an 8 GB stick is going to be severely pressed for space on root. A 16 GB or bigger stick will be just fine.

**** WARNING ****
If you are using more than 1 GPU for mining, do NOT use Oneiric Ocelot v11.10.  There are some major bugs in the drivers in OO that make using multiple GPUs an exercise in frutration.  Use Natty Narwhal for multi-GPU setups.
**** WARNING ****

Perform each step in order, following the directions.  At the end, you'll have a working version of poclbm and phoenix miner.  

• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install screen
• screen -S update sudo apt-get install fglrx vim openssh-server subversion git-core python-numpy g++ libboost-all-dev
  Enter your password, hit enter and press Y for yes. When the install starts, hit CTRL-a and then d, you should be dropped back to the shell prompt.
  
• screen -d -m -S app wget http://download2-developer.amd.com/amd/APPSDK/AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx64.tgz
• wget http://eclipsemc.com/files/pyopencl-0.92.tar.gz
• tar xvfz pyopencl-0.92.tar.gz
• echo export DISPLAY=:0 >> ~/.bashrc
• echo export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx64/lib/x86_64/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH >> ~/.bashrc
• source ~/.bashrc
• screen -r app
  Wait for the download to finish or if you get "There is no screen to be resumed matching app", then continue on.
  
• sudo tar xvfz AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx64.tgz -C /opt
• sudo tar xvfz /opt/AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx64/icd-registration.tgz -C /
• sudo sh -c 'echo "/opt/AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx64" >> /etc/ld.so.conf.d/local.conf'
• screen -r update
  Wait for the update to finish, otherwise or if you get "There is no screen to be resumed matching update" continue on.
  
• cd pyopencl-0.92
• ./configure.py --cl-inc-dir=/opt/AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx64/include --cl-lib-dir=/opt/AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx64/lib/x86_64
• sudo ldconfig
• make -j3
• sudo make install
• cd ~
• git clone https://github.com/m0mchil/poclbm.git
• git clone https://github.com/jedi95/Phoenix-Miner.git
• sudo aticonfig --initial -f --adapter=all
• sudo reboot

That's it, you're done.

You should now have a fully functional Ubuntu 11.04 mining rig with Phoenix and poclbm installed. To test it out, you can go into the poclbm directory and run poclbm without any switches and see if your graphics card(s) show up. Do this with:

cd poclbm
./poclbm.py

It should list your CPU (possibly) and your graphics cores available.

Here's a couple useful tricks for working with your graphics cards:

To display the temperature of your cores:

aticonfig --odgt --adapter=all

To display the clock speeds of your cores:

aticonfig --odgc --adapter=all

To show or set your fan speed:

Shows fan speed
aticonfig --pplib-cmd "get fanspeed 0"

Sets fan speed to 100%
aticonfig --pplib-cmd "set fanspeed 0 100"

If you have multiple cores, you'll need to export a different display variable to access the different cores, like this:

Show fan speed on 2nd card:  
export DISPLAY=:0.1; aticonfig --pplib-cmd "get fanspeed 0"

You can change the .1 to .2, .3 etc... for how many cards you have in the system.

To change your clock rates:

Set your core clock to 900MHz and your memory clock to 1000MHz on all cards. Change according to your desire.
aticonfig --od-setclocks=900,1000 --adapter=all

To set for a particular card, change --adapter=all to the adapter number you want to change.

That should take care of just about everything you need to do to mine in a Bitcoin pool.

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[gnar1ta$]

Great guide, just like the last one, but I still wonder couldn't this be made much easier with cgminer?  I just set up 2 rigs with a fresh install: update, upgrade, install a couple packages, wget ubuntu cgminer built.tar, untar and run - I added atitweak, screen, ssh, and a startup script and it still wasn't this lengthy.  GPU control is easier that way also.  The pool is great by the way and getting better, thanks for keeping up the improvements.

[Inaba]

People can add cgminer if they want as easily as you mentioned.  Some people don't like it / don't use it for various reasons - I don't/didn't because anything prior to v2 would crash fairly often.  I also have had some troubles with v2.0.7 being substantially slower than poclbm and version 1.6.x of cgminer.  I'm sure it's some tweaks that I need to do, I just haven't had time to figure it out. 

In either case, to build a fully functional cgminer, you need to do a lot more steps - I'd be more inclined to build the system to compile the git of cgminer, which requires even more steps than what's in this guide.  But for most people, the precompiled binary is perfectly fine, I'd imagine.

This guide will give you a fully functional system for all the miners, it could certainly be pared down if it focused on only one thing, though. 

[reedlaw]

Is there any work-around to the issue of only being able to mine with one card in Oneiric? At one point I was able to do it, but after a recent upgrade, no more.

[Inaba]

I don't know... I know some people have managed it, but I have not revisited it since.   I just install Natty at present.

[Prattler]

I was able to mine on Oneiric Ocelot 11.10, but I was losing 2% hashrate with otherwise same setup. Couldn't figure it out, just had to fall back to Natty Narwhal 11.04.

[matthewh3]

Sorry if this sounds stupid but can you use this guide with LTS versions of Ubuntu and how do you start the miner from the command line 

[Inaba]

Yes you can and it really depends on the miner program. Best to read the relevant  program thread.

[CoinSpeculator]

Is there a preferred source for 11.04?  The website only list 11.10 and 10.04 as options now.

[DILLIGAF]

Is there a preferred source for 11.04?  The website only list 11.10 and 10.04 as options now.

http://releases.ubuntu.com/natty/