0.3 almost ready -- please test the Mac version!

I finished everything on my list to do for version 0.3.  The code on SVN is about ready to release.

Testing at this point is much appreciated.

Very nice! There have definitely been some major improvements, including the hashmeter, RPC support, and a command-line daemon. It would be nice if the listtransactions RPC method were finished before the next release, though. Also, some code should be added to the JSON-RPC methods to list out dHashesPerSec.

Great work Satoshi!

Should we try for some publicity? Slashdot is good if we can get it.

I've had a number of submissions accepted, though always by one editor that no longer works there. Anyone else with a Slashdot connection?

My fear is too many programmers would latch onto that for checking for received payments.  It can never be reliable that way.  The list/getreceivedbyaddress/label functions are the only way to do it reliably.

We shouldn't delay forever until every possible feature is done.  There's always going to be one more thing to do.

I just finished creating a clean Amazon EC2 debian 5.0 machine image with everything I needed to compile bitcoind, and it compiled (using a variation of Laszlo's makefile.unix) and is running fine (just finished downloading the block chain).  I'll let you know if it misbehaves.

I had trouble compiling the gtk version, but I think that's because I did something wrong compiling wxWidgets.  I don't need no stinkin' graphics (and am not a wxWidgets expert), so I'm not going to bother trying to fix that.

What operating system?

Normally when it does that it's because the directory where the data directory should go doesn't exist.  See if the "%appdata%" directory exists.

Do you get that error with 0.2 also?  It's hard to see how you could get that with 0.3 and not with 0.2 since there's nothing different in that regard.

davidonpda, were you also running laszlo's build previously?

Check if the "%appdata%" directory exists, and "%appdata%\bitcoin"

Try:
 rename "%appdata%\bitcoin" bitcoin2

does it work then?

You figured it out faster than I could post a reply.  

It looks like laszlo's build of Berkeley DB has database/log.* files that are not compatible with ours.  The .dat files are fine, their format shouldn't ever change.  All data is stored in the .dat files.  All your own data is stored in wallet.dat.  If you had waited for it to redownload the block chain, your missing transactions and generateds would have appeared as the block chain reached the point where those transactions were recorded.

When you copied the directory except log.0000000002, that's the best solution.  You should be good now.

The database/log.* files only contain temporary database data.  If you exited bitcoin normally the last time, not exited by forced terminating it or crashing, then the database/log.* files can normally be deleted safely.  They're only used so that if the database is in the middle of a transaction when the computer crashes or the program is killed or crashes, then it could recover without losing data.

Please keep running v0.3 if at all possible, don't go back to v0.2.10.

Anyone else who hits this problem, move the database\log.000000000* files somewhere else.  (if it works fine after that, you can delete them later)

I'm reluctant to make the installer delete or move those files.  If the previous run was stopped by crashing or killed, that would be the wrong thing to do.

Runs fine under WINE. *rhymes*

It automatically switched the language to German, too. Now that I can see the translation in the client itself, I noticed a few things to improve, and will post a new .po file within the next two or so days.

Laszlo figured out that enabling some more optimisation increased performance about 20%, so 0.3 hashes 20% faster than 0.2.0, but I assume he used that in his own build.

30khash increase to what total rate?  (to figure the % increase)

Here's RC1 for linux for testing:
(link removed, see below)

It contains both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries.

Recent changes:

build-unix.txt:
- Added instructions for building wxBase, which is needed to compile bitcoind.
- The package libboost-dev doesn't install anything anymore, you need to get libboost-all-dev.
- Updated version numbers.

makefile.unix:
- The libboost libraries have removed the "-mt" from their filenames in 1.40.  If you're compiling with Boost 1.38 or lower, like on Ubuntu Karmic, you would need to change it back to boost_system-mt and boost_filesystem-mt.

will it change something if you release a x64 bit version for Windows?

I don't know.  Maybe someone with more Linux experience knows how to install the library it needs.

I built it on Ubuntu 10.04.  I hope that wasn't a mistake.  Maybe it should have been built on an older version for more backward compatibility.  Is this a problem on Linux, that if you build on the latest version, then it has trouble working on older versions?  Is there any way I can downgrade to an older version of GCC on 10.04?

The 64-bit version shouldn't be any faster than the 32-bit version, but it would be great if someone could do a side-by-side comparison of the two linux versions and check.  SHA-256 is a 32-bit algorithm and nothing in BitcoinMiner uses 64-bit at all.

We don't need to bother with a 64-bit version for Windows.  32-bit programs work on all versions of Windows.  It's not like Linux where the 64-bit OS wants 64-bit programs.

I'm also curious if it's a little faster on linux than windows.

Do you think I should make the directories:
/bin32/
/bin64/
instead of
/bin/32/
/bin/64/

Linux on an overclocked Pentium D:
- 1 core: 565 khash/s, 1.01 kW h/day
- 2 cores: 1100 khash/s, 1.78 kW h/day

The new version seems to give me an improvement of 20-30 khash/s (with two cores) over SVN 80 with laszlo's patch.

Does anyone know what I have to change in the makefile so that I don't have to add LD_LIBRARY_PATH pointing to the dependency libraries when executing BitCoin? I already have -I and -L pointing to the single, correct location. (This isn't caused by the new version; I've always had this problem.)

Thanks virtualcoin, that's a perfect comparison.

The 8% speedup from 32-bit Windows (2310k) to 32-bit Linux (2500k) is probably from the newer version of GCC on Linux (4.4.3 vs 3.4.5).

The 15% speedup from 32-bit to 64-bit Linux is more of a mystery.  The code is completely 32-bit.

Hmm, I think the 8 extra registers added by x86-64 must be what's helping.  That would make a significant difference to SHA if it could hold most of the 16 state variables in registers.

It looks good! The number of hashes per second intermittently disappears for a few seconds at a time. I think it might be triggered by clicking on the file menu multiple times. I'm using the Linux 64-bit build.

Changed the version number to 1.3 and removed "Beta".

(links removed, see below)

Uses irc.lfnet.org.

MinGW still only has good old stable 3.4.5.  There's not much reason for them to update it.

When I looked at the 3.4.5 compiled SHA disassembly, I couldn't see any room for improvement at all.  I can't imagine how 8% more could be squeezed out of it.  Is it possible Windows could have 8% more overhead?  Not making system calls or anything, just plain busy computational code, could task switching and other housekeeping operations take away that much?

It is, but generating is more than twice as slow.

Mac OS version - requires Intel processor and 10.5 (10.4 not supported)

http://heliacal.net/~solar/bitcoin/builds/MacOSX-Intel-0.3/bitcoin-0.3.0.zip

I'm running rc4 on xp32/64 and everything seems ok so far,
installed without problems, ~50connections on a forwarded node, 8 on others,
limited to 1(of2) and 1-2(of3) cores, which scales up nicely, but hasnt generated any coins yet.
Hopefully i'll get some tonight.