I played with .6 "preview" and it seemed less stable than .5, but then again, I don't have any 7xxx series GPU which was the stronger reason of why it was being built. I was just using 5xxx, 6xxx, and FPGAs. I too donated, even for the mystical unicorn that was BAMT Pro with Android app. I was sad to see progress languish, but totally understand why. Staying motivated to provide updates to a product that you see downloaded X number of times and taking patches is hard. You get a feel for how many people are just using and not contributing at all, and that can be frustrating, especially if you have other commitments in life and have to move on opportunities that do make you money. A hobby is hobby until it becomes work, which ends up sucking especially work you don't get compensated for doing.

That being said, I do wish for the project to continue, in whatever form that may be. There will be a large number of GPU based users with Alt coin affinity looking for a home once the ASICs really start to deploy, they are going to gravitate to what is easy to use and setup. But Alt coins being Alt coins, how much contribution do you think they would be willing to give is the question and do you really want to be taking donations in that denomination, then have to deal with conversions etc. It's a PITA.

It is my opinion that the next wave of mining with ASICs would be a target market. "BAMT ASIC" All the features and simplicity of BAMT but for the ASIC miners. USB Boot, easy updating cgminer/bfgminer support when new releases become available, graphs, full integration with gpumon/mgpumon, (renamed asicmon/masicmon) central management of your farm from a web browser or mobile device. I don't know how much you would be able to receive in donations for such a product, I would of course donate, but that alone would not be worth your time. But it is fun to dream of such a product. (Yes I know you can make some of this with cgminer's API with miner.php, and I have.)

Some of us in the FPGA crowd have gravitated to the Pi/Minepeon product, which has been fun, but the Pi has little glitches on occasion with it's USB hardware that makes you long for the stability of a standard Intel/AMD motherboard, of which many of us have stacks of these days. Plus I doubt a Pi is going to handle 8+ Single SCs or a couple Mini Rigs.

So I guess it is really up to you on the direction you want to take it. I for one would like to see it evolve.

I would also donate for an updated version with newest miners, drivers, litecoin support, etc.

I don't have much but I'd throw in what I can.

Did anyone ever come up with a solution for this error at startup:

startpar: service(s) returned failure: gdm ... failed!

Could a couple of people post what type of thumb drives they've gotten to work with BAMT? I'm on my fourth thumb drive on two different systems and still no love.

I've been using SanDisk Cruzer 2GB sticks, I've had 1 go bad out of 12 over the past 2 years or so. Using mostly ASUS and MSI motherboards.

I know it probably seemed like a dumb question  : )  I've tried Centon, Kingston, Sandisk, generic, and even a Transcend SD card, still no luck.

Must be an incompatible board I guess. If anyone has another fix, please let me know.

Don't have board in front of me but it's probably a more obscure one. The system I'm testing it on is one of those compact Shuttle brand small form factor machines, so the board may not be a common one. That's a good thought about the USB though -- maybe I'll blow the BAMT image to a spare SATA drive and try to boot from that...

Without knowing your configuration specifics, I would say that if the GPU is seen by BAMT it's going to be something in your config files, like your pool connect string. You might start there.

I tried coping a working pool file but it still didn't work