bitcoind just hangs (no output at all) I do realize that in the early stages bitcoin has to download a lot (How long does it take to download the blockchain?), however, I assume this is like wget or rsync where it displays the progress. Right now, when I issue the command bitcoind, it just hangs and outputs nothing. Could this be due to closed ports? Is it sufficient that I opened ports on my Ubuntu router, or must I forward those ports? Alternatively, is there a command line parameter I have to issue to get the output of bitcoind?
No output is normal, it's meant to be run as a daemon. If you want to see progress however, try bitcoind -printtoconsole or tail -f ~/.bitcoin/debug.log.