Ethereum
The Ethereum Project provides an open-source, distributed, blockchain-based platform for so-called wikipedia:Smart contracts.
Clients
Go Ethereum
Go Ethereum, the official Go implementation of the Ethereum protocol, is available as the go-ethereum package.
Create an account with geth account new
.
The client can be started with geth
, and it will proceed to download several gigabytes of blockchain data. This will take a very long time. This time can be shortened with
$ geth --fast --cache=1024
Higher cache values appear to speed up the process more[1].
Optionally, start the client with geth console
to get a JavaScript console for more meaningful interaction.
This console can then be attached-to from another terminal or remotely with geth attach [hostname:port defaults to localhost]
.
To check balances in the console or attach modes, use web3.fromWei(eth.getBalance(eth.coinbase), "ether")
.
To start CPU mining, use geth --mine
. This is far less efficient than GPU mining, and ethereum.org does not recommend it.
GPU Mining with geth
GPU mining with geth has been discontinued.
Ethereum Wallet
You can install the Ethereum Wallet via the mistAUR package or the GitHub releases. Mist will connect to a running geth instance or start its own if it cannot find one.
If you use a GitHub release, download the most recent Linux one with the zip extension: Ethereum-Wallet-linux64-version.zip
; unzip the file and run ./ethereumwallet
.
If the application fails to start with error while loading shared libraries: libgtk-x11-2.0.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
, install the GTK+ 2 library.
The wallet also implements an Ethereum node.