Crypto Mining Blog

A lot of people that are not into Linux and are not familiar with it try to stay away form it, but when we are talking about Litecoin and other scrypt crypto mining you might want to reconsider if you are building a mining rig. Linux has some advantages other than being free when you compare it to Windows, and the best thing is that there are special distributions already available that might make it very easy for you to use them for scrypt mining rigs that you are building. One of the advantage is that Linux has no trouble using multiple video cards like 6 on a single motherboard, something that can bring you a real headache with some Windows versions. Also using a specialized mining Linux distribution means that you don’t need to have a lot of free space, actually you don’t need to even use a hard drive to install it on, you can directly boot it from a flash drive. And the specialized mining distributions you only need to setup the mining pool, your username and pass for the worker and they are ready to be used and you can remotely monitor them – no need of advanced Linux knowledge at all.

Now, it all may seem like a dream, however there is one important thing that you should be well aware of – the pretty much only more significant disadvantage of using a Linux Litecoin mining distribution. You are most likely not going to be able to control the GPU voltage from these distributions on all video cards (from within AMDOverdriveCtrl), some may work, others may not, but most likely you will have trouble with most of the cards. On Windows you have multiple options like Sapphire Trixx, MSI Afterbutner and other manufacturers specialized overclocking software for a specific video card. On Linux mining distributions you do have a tool that may show you the voltages, but you will probably not be able to change them, though you cans till control the clock settings for the video memory and the graphics processor. This is important, because normally you can lower the voltage below the standard set value and overclock the video card and it can still mine cryptos stable. This is being done in order for the cards to use less power and emit less heat, thus staying cooler and more silent. If the cooling and the noise is not a problem and you have ensured low operating temperatures, then there is no problem not to lower the voltage of the cards.

After this short introduction we are going to point your attention to two specialized Litecoin mining distributions based on Linux that you might want to check out and try on your mining rigs. These are the Litecoin-BAMT and SMOS Linux with them being very similar to each other. They both come in the form of an image file that you can write directly on a USB flash drive and then boot the operating system from that drive. After the first start you have to edit the cgminer config file ( /etc/bamt/cgminer.conf ) with your mining pool settings and you are ready to start mining. You can then monitor the performance of the mining rig and control it either trough a remote console login, or through a web based interface, so there is no need for physical access anymore.

– For more information about the Litecoin-BAMT Linux mining distribution…
– For more information about the SMOS Linux scrypt mining distribution…