Folding Forum

Has one successfully installed and ran folding at home on mint 19.1? I'm pulling my hair out - what little bit I have left anyway....
I have an older mining rig with 4 amd gpus (RX480/570) that ive ran all sorts of linux distros on plus windows. Im tired of issues with windows and fah...
Ive installed mint 19.1 (with a few crashes after updates - ill check and maybe roll back the kernel when i get home). I have read and read and read. Installed the latest AMD drivers and the openCL dev package. Then installed the folding at home client. Just cant get it the software to recognise the video cards nor have complete success with the AMD drivers. I did have a crash last night after installing the newest AMD drivers from their website (after changing the 2 lines to ubuntu and 18.04 as read on a few threads/other forums). I didnt look at the log last night after the crash/driver install. Curious if anyone is folding with AMD gpus on mint....or have any advice, i do NOT want to go back to windows haha....

Mint is a derivative of Ubuntu, so FAH apps should work on it headless (no FAHControl).

FAHControl for Linux, only works on 18.04 (ever since 18.10 is discontinued), and 16.04.6 LTS still should work for 1 more year.

For Ubuntu/Mint 19,
1- There's no FAHControl, meaning no visual program aside from the browser client, which works very finicky.
2- Setting up FAHClient without control is quite a headache.

Perhaps some users could share their experience in setting up FAHClient without the help of Control (like which files to edit for setting it up)?

I also don't own AMD GPUs, so I can't help you there.

MeeLee wrote:2- Setting up FAHClient without control is quite a headache.

True, but you only need one copy of FAHControl to manage multiple copies of FAHClient on multiple OSs.

Setting up remote monitoring can also be quite a headache, but for me, there are longer term benefits once it works. A single machine on your LAN can run FAHControl and it's not needed continuously. (Maybe a floating laptop.) It would be probably easier to write a HowTo procedure for remote monitoring than to consider all the things that might come up during the initial installation of FAHClient on various disros.

I'd be mainly interested in a Ubuntu/Debian file list,
A list of to be edited files, like which file to edit when adding or removing GPU slots, edit the file that enables GPUs, sets folding priority, and edit the file that sets up user name, team and key.

Thank you all for the input. I gave up and went back to windows 10 for now. Slightly unstable as usual per windows, but folding away....

I have just tried some examples of this problem...have mostly negative reports but found one that will work.

1. I wanted to move on from xubuntu to debian because of what ubuntu is doing with GTK2 (stealth depreciation) so tried to install in sequence amdgpu-pro 18.20 then 19.20 (current) in debian 9.9 on an i3 intel with a low profile RX 550. Failed on prereqs for both versions of amdgpu-pro.

2. Tried an inplace distribution upgrade to debian 10.0; still failed on prereqs for both version of amdgpu-pro.

2a. Have had from late 2018 to early 2019 this same machine running xubuntu 18.04.1 with amdgpu-pro 18.2. It worked on kernels 4.15.20 to 4.15.38?? It produced 55 - 70k/ppd on gpu and 12 - 18k/ppd on cpu@4core.

3. Reinstalled xubuntu 18.04.1 and tried several 4.15 kernels, failed on both versions of amdgpu-pro.

4. Found the answer with a lot of reading from the ultimate source of accurate info (random guy on the internet)....upgrade to a 5.0.0-20 kernel. I used the amdgpu-pro 19.20 as was getting very tired of the whole project by then. This has been working for several days now, but production is down from earlier.

Produces 45 - 58k/ppd on the rx550 and 12 - 16k/ppd on the i3 4150. The same source said you have to use the 18.04.1 (original LTS iso) I took him at his word and did not test whether any of the 18.04.2 or up would work.

I realize xubuntu is not mint....but you can make it look like it and it does in fact work with late model amd gpu and will play nice with windows 10.

Hope that helps....