Getting Bismuth working on Linux (Debian 9)

So, based on this post by @joseph, I decided why not try out Bismuth on Debian. For more information on Bismuth, I refer you to his post, as it covers things far better than I can here.

All I am going to do here is outline the steps I took to get the Bismuth client working and mining on my Linux box, a Debian 9 laptop.

Note: this was written as I did stuff, so its in chronological order of actions taken, the issues I ran into, and how I solved them. Read the entire post before trying to reproduce what I did.

So, firstly I cloned the repo, linked here using Git.

$ git clone https://github.com/hclivess/Bismuth

Next, because this is Python, I created a virtualenv and activated it.

$ virtualenv -p python2 venv
$ source venv/bin/activate

Now, this next bit was the result of a LOT of trial and error, but here is how I got the dependencies installed.

$ sudo apt-get install python-tk
$ pip install pyqrcode simple-crypt six pysocks

With this, stuff seemed to work fine.

Genesis

Next, I ran the following command, and saved the output - it creates our private/public keypair, etc:

$ python genesis.py

Starting the GUI

This was quite simple. Screenshot below, basically just "python gui.py".

Mining...

Mining took me a couple of minutes to work out. First, I have to start a Node.

$ python node.py

Then, in another terminal window, I launched the miner.

$ source venv/bin/activate
$ python miner.py

Easy... Or so I thought.

Problems, and my disgustingly hacky workaround.

So, the next bit is troubleshooting. I noticed my mempool.db was broken, and that I was "beyond genesis". So, here is how I fixed that.

1. I deleted mempool.db and static/ledger.db
2. I re-ran genesis.py, saving the output.
3. I re-downloaded the ledger database file.
4. I relaunched the node, and GUI, and waited a while for the blockchain to resync...
5. I launched the miner.
6. Profit?

$ rm mempool.db static/ledger.db
$ cd static
$ wget https://github.com/hclivess/Bismuth/raw/master/static/ledger.db

Here is a screenshot of the whole thing working. I think. I haven't mined anything yet, but I figure I'll leave it a few hours and see what happens.

Any comments/corrections or showing me that I have done something horrendously wrong are appreciated!