Everything the Mac got on 10 September now reaches Linux and WSL, plus three
faults found by running the build on a real rig. Linux and WSL have been on
0.23.1 since 27 August. Nothing here makes a Linux rig earn today. Measured on
release day: Byron Bay, the default, serves HTTP 503 from its own site and its
stratum port refuses connections; minebtx's own page is titled "Paused";
btx-pool.com is answering, and reports zero workers and zero hashrate. The one
pool the census sees paying, luckypool.io, refuses every connection an open
client knows how to make. What this release does is say that on the dashboard,
from a source that still works when the pools' own feeds do not, and reconnect
by itself the moment a pool returns.
- easyBTX reads the network census. easybtx.com measures every reachable
BTX node's own headers every half hour, groups them into chains, says which
chain carries the most work, and places each pool on a chain by the block
hashes it publishes. The Pool card says whether your pool is paying, paused
or not answering, and whether the chain it mines is the one with the most
work. It concludes nothing from a census older than three hours, and it
keeps three things apart that are easy to collapse into one: the census
could not be reached, the census reached no pool, and the census read pools
and none is paying. Only the last is a statement about BTX.
- "Paused" and "no answer" replace "connecting…". A rig on a paused pool
used to show "Pool: connecting to stratum.btxbyronbay.com…" indefinitely. It
now says the pool is paused by its operator, or that the census got no
answer from it, and that it will reconnect on its own.
- The pool list shows what each pool is doing right now, as a live badge
from the census beside the note written at release time.
- You are told where mining pays, even when it is not here — including
luckypool.io, and that easyBTX cannot mine there yet.
- Balances read from btxscan.
explorer.minebtx.com has been dead since
mid-August, so every balance read "—". Balances and the built-in wallet now
read api.btxscan.io; sending broadcasts through the same host.
- Fresh chain pins. 210,497 sits above the 5 September split, on the live
chain, where the branch that lost has a different block; 199,298 sits below
it, and is the last block every branch since August agrees on. Both were
re-read on release day, and api.btxscan.io and this rig's own fully-synced
node return the same hash for each. btxscan follows the same signer this
node does, so that is one chain view checked twice rather than two
independent ones — what makes it worth checking is that the census, measured
from other nodes' headers, places that chain as the one carrying the most
work.
Three faults, all found by running the build rather than reasoning about it:
- A pool the census could not read was reported to you as "offline". The
census has a state for "the pool's own page says it is paused" and a
separate one for "no usable answer from the pool's stats endpoint". The
second is a fact about the census's reach, not a verdict on the pool, and
the interface was printing it as "✕ offline". On release day that was
provably wrong: the census could not read btx-pool.com, while btx-pool.com
answered, published a block height, and accepted connections on its stratum
port. It now says the census got no answer, and says that this can be the
pool or the census. The release-time note on that pool, which claimed its
own site said it was offline, was wrong for the same reason and has been
corrected — the only "offline" on that page describes a wallet tool.
- The pool easyBTX showed as the Linux default was not the pool it mined
to. Settings → Mining pool labelled minebtx "Default ·" on Linux and
Windows, while the backend has resolved Byron Bay on every platform and
takes no per-platform branch at all. The census can describe Byron Bay and
btx-pool.com; it has no row for minebtx. So on Linux this release's headline
feature had nothing to say about the very row the app called the default,
and the selection dot sat on a different row once the real pool resolved.
Both now say Byron Bay, which is what the backend was mining to all along.
- The "paused" mark drew as an empty box. The Linux build bundles a
Latin-subset text face and no symbol font, and it ships no fontconfig, so
any glyph outside that subset falls through to the host. On a stock Ubuntu
22.04 / WSL install the whole font set is DejaVu and Ubuntu, which cover
every other mark the census uses but not the pause symbol: the first 0.27.0
build rendered "POOL CHAIN ▯ paused" on the release whose point is saying a
pool is paused. It now uses a mark those fonts do have, and a unit test
fails CI if that character comes back. That test also revealed that CI never
ran this app's frontend suite at all — the job next door ran the node app's
— so the miner's tests now run on every push.
Known, and not fixed here: a handful of older decorative symbols elsewhere in
the interface (the ⓘ info buttons, the mining and chain marks in the status
strip) have no font on a stock Linux install either and draw as empty boxes.
They predate this release and shipped that way in 0.23.1. Fixing them properly
means bundling a symbol font rather than swapping characters one at a time.
What did not change: the mining path. Linux and WSL mine through matador, the
closed third-party solver, exactly as 0.23.1 did; the bundled CUDA pool solver
is the same pinned btx-prebuilds-v0.32.11 binary, verified against its hash
at build time. When a pool returns, a rig on 0.27.0 mines there without an
update.
Version numbering note, and a correction. Mac and Linux alternate minor
versions and share one tag namespace. The 0.26.0 notes said "0.25 belongs to
Linux" — 0.25 was never cut, and the shared source tree moved to 0.26 with the
Mac release, so the next number Linux can take without moving the tree
backwards is 0.27.