If anyone would like to point me in the right starting direction, I would appreciate it. Things like what OS I should put on my pi, what miner I should use... I plan to buy this: http://www.amazon.com/Anker%C2%AE-Uspeed-7-Port-Adapter-Chipset/dp/B006TT91TW ... can I use that to power the pi, and then also plug it into the PI for splitting to the USB miners? or will that create some sort of infinite loop of doom... (pure ignorance here).
I got a cheap shitty unbranded chinese hubs to use with my pi (with ztex). cant use more than 2 units cause its shitty.
To answer your question specifically, there wont be any loop thingy. The power jack on pi is not real usb port. Its just a power port . The data pins are not used/connected. So u can power a pi from the same hub the pi uses.
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Package includes: 1 USB 3.0 7-port Hub / 1 12V 3A Power Adapter / 1 USB 3.0 Cable (3 feet) / 1 User Manual.
Means u can use 1 pi + 5 usb erupter cause i think each needs 0.5A ... hmm.. 12V 3A .. i thought USB is 5v.
One thing u need to be careful. You dont want the hub to backfeed power from the raspi's USB(not power) port, many hubs have this problem. even if the pi boots up it would become unstable, or writa garbage on the SD card. work-around is to block the usb pin 1 with electrical tape or smthn... (i being cheap bastard used piece of paper
). OR cut out the +ve wire from the usb cable... - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Serial_Bus#Standard_connectors The image im using is from http://sirlagz.net/2013/02/14/raspbian-server-edition-version-2-3/
Running it completely headless, never had to touch monitor or keyboard with it. Cgminer compiles without any fuss at all. Should be really trivial if uve ever used a real OS like linux. Windows n00bs might needs step by step guides...
I need to buy some decent hubs for myself...