Debian-specific Bitcoin usage notes
===================================


Wrapper to ease initial startup
-------------------------------

Debian ships with a small wrapper for bitcoind to ease initial startup:

  * Store a random generated password in ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf
  * Setup ~/.bitcoin/DB_CONFIG to purge no longer needed dblog files

Above is done only when the respective files do not already exist.


Upgrading Problems
------------------

Bitcoin uses a recent (at compile time) version of Berkeley DB.

Unfortunately Bitcoin is not clever enough to automatically update its
database, so if you fail to restart Bitcoin after a package update, the
database may be outdated and need manual update.

The following might work:

    db4.8_recover -h ~/.bitcoin
    db_upgrade -h ~/.bitcoin wallet.dat

Above commands need the packages db-util and db4.8-util installed.
If that fails then try with db4.7-util instead.


Where is the graphical user interface?
--------------------------------------

Currently Debian packaging provides only bitcoind, a combined daemon and
CLI tool to interact with the daemon.  A graphical user interface is
offered upstream as well, but unfortunately require an experimental
version of the wxWidgets toolkit (due to improved Unicode support) which
is not yet available in Debian.


 -- Jonas Smedegaard <dr@jones.dk>  Tue, 07 Jun 2011 10:52:52 +0200
