Mining On Xubuntu 2020-06-03

A couple of weeks ago I found a place where I can use electricity without payin' for it. So I setup a couple laptops to mine digital coins to take advantage of the situation. I still think digital coins are currency the way cheeseburgers are currency, but I am hoping that I can just mine enough crap to pay for a virtual private server somewhere. If it all works out it will basically pay for a little server that can run Minetest or something.

Dude, I wanna go back to bed.

So as it turns out I chose to run Cudo Miner on these laptops. I am sure there are plenty of people who would say that is a terrible idea for a variety of reasons. Frankly, it isn't hard to find people willing to say that any mining software is garbage and that something else should be used. One of the things that attracted me to Cudo Miner was that they offer an image that you can download, write to a USB stick, and run off that alone. Since the laptops I am using are scavenged from the garbage and do not have hard drives (or batteries), I thought this was a good option. However they seem to be unstable for some reason. It could be the electricity where I have them, or it could be their OS.

Tonight I setup one of the laptops with Xubuntu (basically just Ubuntu with the Xfce desktop environment) and then installed the Cudo console mining application from their respository. It sucks that they have no 32bit build but I guess that's progress for ya. Since the application doesn't really need to be managed locally it doesn't much matter if I don't have their fancy desktop app installed. I just need to make sure the service is running. Besides, I can see which devices are running or not by logging in to their web site. Currently the new Xubuntu install is running almost 10% faster than the Cudo Miner OS version. It could be minor differences in memory or something, but I have a feeling if it is stable then I'll switch the other laptops over soon.

The real question is whether or not I'll be able to get the earned coins out of Cudo and in to my digital wallet that I created. Once it is in my wallet then I'll believe Cudo isn't a total scam. So far I have only mined enough coin to pay the withdrawl fee, so I will have to wait a bit [hopefully just a week or so] before I can setup the transfer. We will see.