Best Linux Distro?

Hey guys! Been reading through the forum and planning on hitting up the whitepaper tomorrow. Had one question though. Is there a prefered linux distro for mining? It’s been a while since I’ve used linux and will need to play around with it a while to get familiar again. Thanks!

Ubuntu seems to be the way to go - it provides the most straight forward compile process.

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I have personally used Ubuntu 16, Ubuntu Server 14, and Lubuntu 16 with no problems, Ubuntu is what the developers are using so it’s a safe bet. I also tried Linux Mint but could not get it to work.

Thanks guys! Ubuntu it is.

i like debian jessie… gnome desktop…real sweet

I’m developing on Ubuntu 16.04, and our CI server runs Debian 8, so it’s guaranteed to work on those two at least :slight_smile:

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Ubuntu is basically Debian so you can use either in exactly the same way. Debian packages are a major source of Ubuntu packages, and obviously, vice versa.

I also have compiled on Ubuntu 14 and 16, both work excellently as shown in the tutorials on minezcash. I have less experience with Debian but enough to know that almost anything you can do on Ubuntu also works exactly the same on Debian.

Thanks everyone for the feedback. Getting ready to install on a desktop that I have. I need to refresh my hardware as well. Any suggestions on what the best hardware for mining is? I’ve read it is VERY memory intensive. Should I be looking at a new x99 motherboard with DDR4 memory? Thanks!

The fastest memory bus and the fastest memory you can get. The cpu is not so important, at least right now. My measly little AMD a10 core probably nearly saturates 1333mhz memory in one thread. I will perform tests with multiple threads, probably using a chroot or maybe in a virtualbox VM, to see how much more the memory can soak up with a second thread. I don’t expect a huge increase but I am sure it will be somewhat bigger.

Actually, come to think of it, clever configuration of VMs might enable someone to divide cores onto blocks of memory on one channel each and this could provide further performance boosts. I don’t know much about how memory channels get mapped onto the memory, and I’m sure that MMU mapping further complicates this. But I am following this quite closely and I will be interested to see how much this cheap but relatively grunty little thing can do.

So would you suggest a Windows box with Ubuntu virtualbox machines in it?
This would save me from rebuilding my windows box. :wink:

Using a minimal ubuntu, yeah, I’d say that would work, especially if you have VM acceleration enabled.

Cool. Thanks for the help zL0k1!