Installing ethminer on an AWS Linux instance

ethminer has worked fantastically for me so far (though, I've mostly used it with NVIDIA GPUs - far from it's ideal hardware configuration). Unlike the other miners that I've used, it automatically makes use of all available GPUs, without having to launch multiple instances of the program, which I think is quite brilliant.

So, here's how you go about installing it on your AWS Linux instance (or for that matter, on any Linux installation):

1. SSH into your AWS Linux instance
   • or open a terminal in your Linux installation if you're installing this on your local machine
2. Open the ethminer releases page in your browser: https://github.com/ethereum-mining/ethminer/releases
3. Scroll down the page to find a stable version (a release that doesn't have a .dev string in it)
   • Currently, that happens to be ethminer 0.11.0
4. Right click on the Linux release link and click Copy Link Address (if you're using Chrome, or click on the equivalent action for your browser)
   • 
   • For the version mentioned above (0.11.0), the link would be: https://github.com/ethereum-mining/ethminer/releases/download/v0.11.0/ethminer-0.11.0-Linux.tar.gz
5. Switch to your SSH session (or terminal as appropriate), and download this file using wget
   • Type wget in your SSH/terminal prompt and paste the link you just copied
   • For the example above, it should look like:
     wget https://github.com/ethereum-mining/ethminer/releases/download/v0.11.0/ethminer-0.11.0-Linux.tar.gz
   • For reference, the command is: wget <url-to-download>
6. Extract the archive that'e been downloaded using tar
   • For the example above (0.11.0 release), the command would be:
     tar -zxf ethminer-0.11.0-Linux.tar.gz
   • For reference, the command is: tar -zxf <path-to-tar.gz-file>
7. Copy the ethminer binary to your /usr/local/bin directory (or any directory that's in your $PATH)
   • Type this into your SSH/terminal prompt ($):
     sudo cp bin/ethminer /usr/local/bin
8. Delete the extracted directory (Just for cleanup. You can skip this step if you'd like to leave the extacted file around, though there's no good reason to retain it)
   • rm -rf bin
9. Now you can run ethminer from any directory
10. For example, here's how you run it to mine with a typical pool:
    • ethminer -G -S <statum-proxy-host:port> -O <pool-user>.<worker-name>:<worker-password>
    • Note that the -G parameter makes ethminer mine using available GPUs (actually, they've removed CPU mining support quite some time ago, so -G has to be specified)
11. Run ethminer --help to get a (long) list of it's various parameters

Tips:

• Make sure you run ethminer in a screen (or tmux, or something similar) session. If you don't, your ethminer process will be killed some time after you disconnect from your SSH session.
• Before your first real run, it might be a good idea to run ethminer -G -M (benchmark mode) to make sure it can actually recognize and can make use of your GPUs, and to get a rough idea of the typical hash rate you can expect from your configuration.