Opening Moves

Disclaimer: This server was set up on the Gentoo Linux platform. Not all commands may be similar between distributions of Linux or Unix. I have personally verified that these commands work on my own server.

Ok, so Battlefield 2 is out and people are going to want to play it. This requires either one of two things: single player mode or an internet server. Well, there are two options for hosting a server at current and those are Linux or Windows. The Windows server is pretty simple so this article is going to focus on setting up a Linux server and getting it ready for play.

First things first: you need a Linux server, or at least access to one. Now, the required specs for a 16 player server is 2.5 Mbit throughput, 1 ghz processor and 256 MB of RAM. Not too steep, really, but you'll want more than that to run even a 16 player server smoothly. Well, once you're sure you have the requirements and you have access to the server, then it's time to install.

If you own this Linux server, or have root to it, then you do NOT want to run the server as root. You will want to make a new user for it. You can do this by running the command “useradd whatevernameyouwant” and then change the password for that user by using the command “passwd whatevernameyouwant”. You can then log in as this user and download/install the server.

Once logged in, you'll want to download the file. This is accomplished by using the command “wget ftp://largedownloads.ea.com/pub/misc/bf2-linuxded-1.0.2442.0-installer.zip”. This will bring up a WGET that looks like this (for the most part):

Now, it's not necessary to download it from EA, in fact there are plenty of mirrors out there for download. This part will likely take the longest, depending on your connection. My server sits on a DS3 and it's still slow, odds are that EA is getting pounded right now for downloads.

So anyway, once that's downloaded the next step is to unzip the file. This is a fairly straight forward command, “unzip bf2-linuxded-1.0.2442.0-installer.zip”. That will unzip the file and place it in your current directory. Once that is done, you'll end up with a file named bf2-linuxded-1.0.2442.0-installer.sh. This file is your install file. Now, let's begin the install.