New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
The best place to start -
Hello, all!
I have been playing with PCs since 1984, with the IBM PCjr. This computer had no hard drive, required a cartridge in order to read the language the software was programmed in, and had a wireless keyboard - using IR tech.
Since then, I have just been an end user of tech, never digging in too deep. Lately, I've been interested in learning how to run a game server. I would like to learn to do it in Linux, but I don't know exactly where to start.
Can you help by linking in some of the best "starter newb" videos you know of? Where do you recommend someone begin?
Comments
Howdy, Oldster!
I'd suggest finding a distribution which is known to be easy to use, and has a "Live" system, which will run mostly/entirely off a DVD/CD, and won't make changes to your computer (unless you tell it to). I'd recommend starting with either Ubuntu, or Mint - as they're both quite simple to use, but have a Debian (very popular Linux distribution) base, and quite active forums.
Your best bet to get useful information is reading, and trying it yourself- which you won't necessarily get by watching videos alone.
My condolences. I owned many of those 80s PCs (TRS80, Timex Sinclair, 8086/8088/etc. white box, Atari 800, etc.) but never made that particular mistake. I did however (20 years later) write a paper about it in school about the legendary marketing failure that was the PcJr. It's actually a textbook example now of the dangers of subtractive marketing.
Anyway...
It's not clear what you're trying to learn. Linux admin? If so, I'd pick a major distro (CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu) and fire up Virtualbox and start trying to do stuff. That's how I learned. You could also grab one of the certification guides (or just its table of contents) and go through that.
There really is no set of videos to quickly learn how to be a sysadmin...but it is a field where you can go very solely self-learning.
Depending on what game you'd like to host a server for, you could use the LGSM script found here: https://gameservermanagers.com/
Supports many popular games, such as CS:GO, ARK, Rust, TF2, etc. etc. I am currently using it for Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Day of Defeat: Source, and a Teamspeak server. It makes installing, updating, and starting/stopping the servers a breeze. Of course since all games aren't currently supported, it would help if we knew what games you're interested in hosting and that could tailor our responses a bit.
Right now, probably a Factorio server. With regard to scripts, I don't know the first thing about how to use them. I know what they are - automated functions. But how they work, or how to use them? Nope. :-)
Well you're in luck! The script I mentioned does support Factorio, so that'll help you out a bit. Essentially a script is just a program that runs a series of instructions in the command line to automate certain tasks. On the command line of your system, you'd simply type the name of the script and the action you'd like to make.
For example:
./fctrserver install
I'd recommend what @WSS and @raindog308 mentioned with first trying it out in a Live system or in a Virtual Machine until you get comfortable. The page I linked has instructions for most common Linux releases (Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, etc.) with how to set up your system and install the game server.
just incase if you want a refresh.... https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-linux-linuxfoundationx-lfs101x-0