Help with a new Litecoin Linux miner

[WhiteHare]

So I want to try mining Litecoins, not so much for profit now ( that will come later). I've been trying to set up a miner on my Ubuntu system (13.04) for several hours now, and am very frustrated. I have little experience with the Terminal, I know some of the basics but not everything, so I need very specific instructions. 

I have setup a wallet and joined a pool, so now I just need to start mining. I would prefer a GUI miner over a Terminal based one, if possible.

[megadarkwood]

Are you using terminal linux or gui linux?

[SinTonNiSon]

if you dont have a dedicated asic miner you will loose cash

[WhiteHare]

I'm not putting up any money on a system at all, I'm using the one I have.

 

if you dont have a dedicated asic miner you will loose cash

As far as I know Litecoin is incompatible with ASIC of FPGA mining. 

 

I am using GUI Ubuntu, but it does have a terminal built in.

So far, most of the work has been done in Terminal.

I followed the instructions here:https://forum.litecoin.net/index.php?topic=43.0 and it seems to have worked from the terminal by typing in litecoind -daemon and then displaying the number of blocks as well as some other info when I type litecoind getinfo.

I have no idea what any of that means to me. 

[RuecanOnRails]

What you have set up is the Litecoin wallet and nothing more. The wallet holds your public and private keys which is used for accepting, and spending coins respectively. The getinfo command is getting the network info such as total amount of blocks, peers, difficulty, balance of your wallet, etc. By running that you are ensuring that you're connected to the network. Running litecoind -daemon will always be terminal based. You need to get the Litecoin QT wallet for gui control.

 

To start mining you will need to download a miner, such as CGMiner https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28402.0

You can find what your estimated hash should be around, and some general starting settings here https://litecoin.info/Mining_Hardware_Comparison

 

In general, and for the time being at least, you will get better results mining in windows. There are issues when it comes to full control overclocking on your GPU. Essentially you have to overclock it and get it stable in windows (not just stable, but also at a good mining rate, there's more to mining than a max overclock) Then flash the cards bios with those settings as the default clock speeds. Perhaps as steamOS pushes drivers further we will be able to easily mine on linux.

 

It's also worth noting that Scrypt mining (Litecoin) currently can only be done via GPU, of which AMD cards destroy Nvidia. Although unless you have a high end GPU, you may end up spending more in electricity than you get mining, in which case calculate what it would cost in power and buy the coins with that directly. Of course eating the costs is always an option for the fun and experience of setting up a miner.