I've not tried mining any cryptocurrencies before. With things like Bitcoin you just cannot compete with the massive, dedicated machines that are out there now. I thought I'd give it a try with Steem just to see what is involved. As I'm on Ubuntu I used this guide and it got me most of the way there. The bit that took me a while to work out is which private key you are supposed to use. I think it's the one you get on the Permissions page on the Active line when you press LOGIN TO SHOW. It begins with a number 5. You need to either put that in the config file or on the command line. Either way it's potentially exposed if anyone gets access to your PC.
My PC has an AMD A8 6500 running at 4.1GHz. I'm not overclocking as I prefer my PC to run cool and quiet in general. I've set the miner to run on two threads for now so I stand a chance of still using the PC.
When I first ran the steemd app it took a long time to download the blockchain. I know you can get an archive of it. Running it subsequently takes a while to start up as it processes the blockchain again and I presume it gets the latest updates. Then it just gets some transactions and starts processing. I'm getting around 5200 hashes per second, so it may take a fair few hours.
I know there's a fair chance that I'll get nothing. I've seen posts like this one saying that one or two accounts are getting just about all the blocks. I guess they have access to some serious hardware to do this. I'll leave it running for a day or two just to see what happens. I think you can see your progress on the steemd.com site, but that's not working for me today.