Want to mine Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies? Profitably? Then you’ll need the right combination of hardware and software. We’ll deal with the hardware end of the business in another article, so the software end will be the subject of this post.
There are dozens of mining software, but very few Linux distributions that ship with the ones you’ll most likely need for you cryptocurrency mining operation. In my search for such Linux distributions, I only managed to find a few. And among those few, only a couple could be considered very good. Unlike your standard Linux distribution, though, they are not free.
Keep in mind that I’ve not used any of these distributions, though I’ll start using one of them tomorrow.
With that disclaimer out of the way, here are the Linux distributions that I found:
Portable Instant Mining Platform
PiMP seems to be the best Linux distribution I found that’s designed for mining. It’s a Debian-based distribution that supports mining with AMD and Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs). The price tag on this is just $30.00, with an installation image that’s almost 4.5 GB in size. I just bought and downloaded this yesterday, so I’ll be writing a little bit more about it in the coming weeks. For more information, visit the product page at https://getpimp.org/.
Interface of Portable Instant Mining Platform (PiMP) for cryptocurrency mining
ethOS Mining OS
ethOS is another good one. It’s, however, not designed for mining Bitcoin, only Ethereum, Zcash, Monero, and other GPU-minable altcoins. It is also limited to mining with AMD GPUs. More information is available at the project’s home page. Like PiMP, this also is not free.
Interface of ethOS cryptocurrency mining OS
Though those two are the best I came across, I also found SMOS Linux, but it doesn’t seem to have been updated for some time. Litecoin BAMT and KopiemTu are others that I could not determine their development statuses. Though not designed for mining, ROKOS Flavors is a Debian-based distribution for Raspberry Pi zero, 2, 3, PINE64+ and other IoT devices that turns those devices into full nodes for staking.
This is definitely a post that I’ll keep updating as I find more information, so keep changing back or follow this site on Twitter. That’s all for the Linux distributions I’ve come across that could be used for your cryptocurrency mining operations. If you know of any good one that’s not listed here, please post a comment.
This is becoming a headache. but after you set up simple mining…where do you go from there? do you have to sign up with dwarfpool, where do i get wallets from, etc. you need a video showing all the way to when you get your profits.
I just dropped Mint after ~5 years. It seems that the Ubuntu based distros have a nasty habit of playing with video drivers. I’ve had to spend hours after (6?) upgrades over the past 5 years. They revert to open source and cause all sorts of problems. I run NVidea for my large monitor and Intel onboard for laptop monitor. Each of these six or more times, the config was swapped out even though I said no to changes.
Regards
Try FluenOS. It is an operating system and management platform dedicated for mining cryptocurrencies on GPU. It’s First Open Source ( GPL licence and source code awailable) and free (of charge also 🙂 ) – visit http://www.fluen.org.
Thank you
Hi Miners!
We here at PiMP do our best to support small miners; we are By Miners, For Miners. We do have large farm customers, but our focus is on making mining easy for small and entry level miners by pre-installing all the drivers and tools.
We offer a lot of free support both in our Discord and our forum, please feel free to check them out if you have any questions both before and after you decide to buy.
Our team has been developing PiMP for over 6 years now! I am not certain what finid meant, but we do sometimes offer rewards for people who like to get involved with our beta and support programs.
Thank you for your support,
Lily
You guys are running something akin to a scam when it comes to your job offers, because your “rewards for people who like to get involved with our beta and support programs” is advertised as a job, when it is not. That’s a scam!
Whats defines a better linux distro for mining so? The available graphics drivers on it? You say PiMP is 4.5GB size; this is very large! I wonder a minimun size + security issues as the most important features
Gave up on PiMP as I had too much issues with it and the dev is pulling a scam with his “job offers”. Best to install all the mining software and gpu drivers you need on your own distro on SSD.
So does it worth to go with a dedicated linux os at mining?
Unless you have a mining farm, not worth it. Just install the mining software you need on a regular desktop or server distro, that is it. Better with a stripped down desktop distro.