Get the source first
git clone https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.git
cd bitcoin
You can read doc/build-unix.md, or follow along.
This step should be no problem.
./autogen.sh
This step may give you some issues…
./configure
If you encounter configure: error: libdb_cxx headers missing
sudo apt-get install libdb5.1++-dev
If you encounter configure: error: Found Berkeley DB other than 4.8, required for portable wallets (–with-incompatible-bdb to ignore), run the following command instead. You can always send your bitcoins to another wallet.
./configure --with-incompatible-bdb
If you encounter checking for boostlib >= 1.20.0… configure: We could not detect the boost libraries (version 1.20 or higher). If you have a staged boost library (still not installed) please specify $BOOST_ROOT in your environment and do not give a PATH to –with-boost option. If you are sure you have boost installed, then check your version number looking in . See http://randspringer.de/boost for more documentation.
sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev
This time you may have a clean run. However, if you scroll up to check the output lines, you may see this line: configure: WARNING: MOC not found; bitcoin-qt frontend will not be built. If you want the frontend, run:
sudo apt-get install libqt4-core libqt4-gui libqt4-dev
Then when you run configure again, you should see checking for moc-qt4… /usr/bin/moc-qt4.
Now, everything is ready.
make
The compilation took like 5 min.
Then install the compiled binary.
make install
Now just run the following to bring up the bitcoin frontend, yeah~~~
bitcoin-qt
To start mining, go to Help > Debug Window > Console and type in setgenerate true to turn it on. Type setgenerate false to stop. My machine became really hot after a while, probably coz my CPU was struggling with all the complex computations. I read that some people bought a separate GPU card for better performance, something to consider.
It’s worth noting that nowadays it’s very hard to efficiently mine bitcoins alone without dedicated software and hardware. Often miners form a pool (or a group) to speed up the process and share the profit. Read more at:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Pooled_mining https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools