BitCoin Mining and Ubuntu 10.10 – ATI Radeon 5XXX/6XXX

As promised, here’s a how-to I wrote after finding several how-to’s that failed. It took me a good part of a week to get this graphics card to mine BitCoins in Ubuntu. I originally got this card mining in Windows 7 first. Quick specs for the record:

AMD Athlon II x4 630

7 GB DDR3 1333MHz RAM

ATI Radeon 5770 graphics card

Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit

Here we go. Before we begin, see if Ubuntu detects your graphics card.

lspci -v

You should see “Display controller: ATI Technologies Inc Device.” If you don’t, shut down to open up your computer and reseat your card, and make sure you’ve plugged in the cable from the power supply. It’s easy to miss if you’re a newbie.

Next, if you have the proprietary drivers enabled, you’ll have to disable them through System > Administration > Additional Drivers. After you disable them, you’ll have to reboot.

Enable Source Code in Ubuntu. System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager. Settings > Repositories > ‘Ubuntu’ tab. Check the checkmark and then exit out of Synaptic.

Open a terminal. Then update your packages.

sudo apt-get update

Then install libqtgui4

sudo apt-get install libqtgui4

Next, you’ll attempt to build your proprietary drivers. You need to download ati-driver-installer-11-3-x86.x86_64.run from AMD’s Support site.

Go back to your terminal window, and navigate to the directory where you downloaded that package.

cd [path to download directory]

Then run the file.

sudo sh ati-driver-installer-11-3-x86.x86_64.run

That will kick off the graphical installer. Select “Install driver 8.831.2 on X.Org 6.9 or later 64-bit.” Then follow the rest of the defaults. Refer to your terminal window to see if it completed successfully. If not, you may have unmet dependancies which are required to build the drivers. If that is the case, open Synaptic Package Manager and install the needed packages and run the last line again.

After that, I was able to see the drivers installed by running this command.

fglrxinfo

It should return your devices information. If it displays “Command not found, ” you’ll have to troubleshoot your driver install.

Reboot.

You’ll have to install three more packages after this. Download the ATI SDK from AMD package here. Then run these.

cd /opt

sudo mv [path to download directory]/ati-stream-sdk-v2.1-lnx64.tgz /opt

sudo tar xfzv ati-stream-sdk-v2.1-lnx64.tgz

Download icd-registration.tgz, then run

Source: foreverrising.wordpress.com