I'm a complete noob and would like to try to solo mine even if it doesn't make sense for me to. I'd just really like to learn how. Can anyone help me out?
The in-client miner only uses cpu. The basics for using a gpu is that you need to point cgminer to localhost (127.0.0.1) and edit the murica coin .conf file with the proper user/pass and port info. You might want to search google for something like "litecoin solo mining guide" or something like that (both litecoin and murica use scrypt. There are also guides for setting up cgminer and info on the proper setting for your gpu. Quite a few steps to nail down to get it running and then there's about zero chance of mining a block because of the net hashrates.