This is a little introduction to the latest version of my steam and hlds frontend bash script.
I will demonstrate it’s use by setting up a new Team Fortress 2 game server with it.
This tutorial assumes an Ubuntu 8.04.2 x86 server system. I set up a VM for the sake of this tutorial.
It has 2 CPUs, 512MB RAM and an 8GB harddrive. So if you want to do a dry run in a VM at first
as well, this will do fine.
Setting up the server OS is beyond the scope of this tutorial. I just assume you have a default
install with an OpenSSH server and that you have fully updated your system after install.
So, let’s get going.
The first thing we’ll need is the screen package.
sudo apt-get install screen
Now let’s create a user for steam and switch to it.
sudo adduser --disabled-login steam sudo su - steam
Let’s download gSteam, my frontend, and set it executable for only steam.
wget http://www.dirty-motherfucker.org/steam/gSteam.sh chmod 700 gSteam.sh
Now we can install the steam client.
./gSteam.sh install steam
As noted in my post regarding the L4D server, if the installation does not seem to properly start or
hang, you can try to create a Steam.cfg file (in the homedir) with preferred content server ids.
http://www.dirty-motherfucker.org/blog/2008/12/26/running-a-source-dedicated-server-for-left-4-dead/
After you get the magic line “Steam Linux Client updated, please retry the command” you are ready to
install some games. So let’s install Team Fortress 2.
./gSteam.sh install tf
The identifiers for the games can be obtained with:
./steam -command list
The “No installation record found at…” messages can be safely ignored.
Now you will have to wait until the game is fully downloaded. This can take from “forever” to
“until the fucking end of time” in some cases. The old Steam.cfg can help here as well, but
I personally found that patience is the best tool.
Once the installation is completed a profile template for tf will be created. gSteam will try its
best to determine some default parameters. You should edit it nevertheless to at least adjust
the name of your server (and possibly the profile).
If everything worked fine you can now simply
./gSteam start tf2
and the thing should be running.
Installing other games is as simple as:
./gSteam install l4d_full
Let me just add that the script is far from fail-proof. Especially error-cases aren’t properly handled. But it saved me a lot of time so I thought I’d share it.
Hope it helps someone else ;)
