So I decided to mess around with bitcoins, not for any purpose other than to learn something new. At this point it's difficult to 'mine' for them since BC's have been around for several years now and they've designed a system which will get exponentially harder over time (a good thing when it comes to a currency situation).

Either way, I ran into some setup trouble so I thought I'd put together a quick write-up with my notes. Now, this article deals with installing poclbm (a mining program) on a Debian Squeeze build without a GUI. Why? Because I don't load GUI's on my servers. =)

IMPORTANT: If you do not have a video card capable of doing GPU mining (moderately high end nVidia or ATI) then you probably want to stop right there, CPU mining (like with your Intel desktop) is very inefficient and will probably cost you more in power to try than the bitcoins you'll get from the mining itself.

This article assumes the following:

• You are proficient with Debian
• You are looking to mine in a pool of miners, this does not describe setup for solo mining
• You have already researched basic bitcoin information and have a general familiarity with it
• You have a bitcoin wallet
• You have setup an account with a miner pool

First, you need to make sure you have contrib in your sources list or this won't be particularly easy.

sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list append contrib to each of your sources. As an example, see below:

deb squeeze main contrib deb-src squeeze main contrib Next, update them.

sudo apt-get update Now you should be able to install the python-pyopencl package which would otherwise not be found.

sudo apt-get install python-pyopencl You should also make sure you have git installed for the next part.

Source: www.torrycrass.com