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I’m using Ubuntu 8.04 Server LTS but most Linux installs should be similar if not the same. There are a few sites out there that explain how to install steam based games on Linux.  Unfortunately none of them I’ve seen have given a line by line install of TF2.  Here are some of my notes because I’ve done this a few times.  First we need to install Steam:

mkdir srcds && cd srcds
wget http://www.steampowered.com/download/hldsupdatetool.bin
chmod +x hldsupdatetool.bin
./hldsupdatetool.bin
./steam

You can run the command ./steam to see a list of commands.  If you want to install TF2, type:

./steam -command update -game “tf” -dir .

This will create a directory called “orangebox” in your “srcds” folder.  Go make a sandwich because unless you’re hosting in a colocation facility (like me ), it’s going to take a while.  When it’s done, or when it appears done, I would run the command again with the “verify_all” flag to make sure it’s 100% installed:

./steam -command update -game “tf” -dir . -verify_all

Note: I had to run this a couple times when I installed this at home before because it wouldn’t complete in one download “session”.

If you want to see a list of games available for download from steam run:

./steam -command list

Let’s move on to… Scripts

First, let’s see how we can manually run the server, and we’ll explore putting it into a script to run in the background so closing your terminal window won’t kill the process. To manually run the server via shell access cd to the orangebox directory and:

./srcds_run -console -game tf +map ctf_2fort -maxplayers 24
-autoupdate

Change variables where you see fit.  I highly recommend using screen so you can detach the process in the background rather than just having source run as a background process.

sudo apt-get install screen

Now create a file, call it whatever you want.  I called it “tf2.sh”.  Enter the following and save:

#!/bin/sh
echo “Starting TF2 Server”
sleep 1
screen -AmdS tf2 ./srcds_run -console -game tf +map ctf_2fort -maxplayers 24 -autoupdate

After the file is saved, the permissions need to be executable: chmod +x tf2.sh

In my next post, I’ll review the server.cfg file.  If people actually read this and like this, I’ll post this as a static page. I’ll also add a script that will reboot the server when there is an upgrade. [More to come]

Tags: half life, hl2, install, linux, server.cfg, source, tf2, ubuntu

Tyler  Nov 20 Auto, Tech