Hi. I would like to second the headless/non-GUI mode for /*nix/i systems. It would be useful to be able to start the Bitcoin software from an initscript or one’s ~/.bashrc (or equivalent) file and let it run in the background, silently cranking away.

Also, what would the feasibility of changing the location of the wallet.dat file be for the Win32 client? I ask this because I was playing around with the .zipped Windows Bitcoin client yesterday, and it struck me that it would make a good portable application. I was toying with the idea of decompressing it into a TrueCrypt volume on a USB drive so that it could, say, be taken on the road, run for a few hours, and then shut down just before the volume was unmounted, but it created the wallet.dat file in the C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Bitcoin directory. In effect, using a portable version of Bitcoin to eventually grow a portable wallet.

What you can currently do is set “Minimize to the tray” in options, then run it as “bitcoin -min” so it starts minimized. The only visible part will be a small (20×20) icon on the tray, which can be doubleclicked if you want to access the UI. Note: there’s a bug with tray icons sometimes disappearing on 64-bit Karmic Koala, not sure if it’s from 64-bit or Karmic, it was fine on 32-bit Jaunty.

We didn’t have time to implement the “Start Bitcoin on system startup” feature on Linux in time for 0.2 so it’s greyed out. I figured Linux people wouldn’t mind doing that manually anyway. I guess they need to know about the -min switch to do it right.

You can locate the data directory where you want with the “-datadir=<directory>” switch. I know someone is already doing that to put it on a TrueCrypt USB drive.

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