Game/dedicated server live CD

[miazmaticdotcom]

I was reading some of the howto's for remastering today and I came up with a cool idea:
A lot of games (Battlefield 1942 and Counterstrike come to mind) have dedicated Linux server software. I was thinking of remastering a Knoppix CD with a bunch of dedicated game server softwares on it. Then, when going to LAN parties, one simply places the CD in an old box that the host has sitting around and serves games off of that.

I'm probably going to wait until the 3.4 image to do that...

Thoughts? Suggestions? Anything particular for me to be aware of?

I'd like to be able to run everything from the command line so as to free up RAM that X would use, but I think some of the softwares require KDE. Has anyone had experience with this?

[othercents]

I have run Half Life Dedicated Server on Red Hat and it only required a command prompt. There is someone that has created a HLDS version of Knoppix that I am trying to get a hold of. If its good as gold then I will be able to setup lan servers for the Counter Strike lan parties that I have been hosting.

Keep in mind the Half Life Server can be run as a client/server configuration in windows so there is not as much need for this server, but Battlefield has to be dedicated so it will bring in the most need. The best thing is to have one CD to do everything. That way we can run any Game Server as needed including the newest Call of Duty.

Regards,
Other

[miazmaticdotcom]

The idea with this is that as well as taking my l337 gaming rig to lan parties, I would drag along an old box and boot it off the CD and run the servers from the command line. Or throw the CD in an old box that someone else dragged along.

[mikeypants]

Well I can't find any binary packages in the Debian package listings, so you'd have to grab it and install it from scratch, though I'm sure that's not a big deal at all to do.

I run Gentoo as my main distro of choice, and looking at the ebuilds for both HL/CStrike server and BF1942 server, neither one of them requires X (i.e. they should both be command line only), so that means you can probably strip a lot out of the CD and have much more room for the server files.

If you need some help, I have a basic remastering howto at

http://dev.tonydanzabonanza.com/tuxstation/.

(Note that it's a work in progress, and I'll be continuing the remastering soon, meaning more info will be put in there on what I've removed.)

My goal is to strip out as much of the bulk as possible to get Knoppix down to under 50 MB. So, my list of packages to remove would probably be similar to what you would want to remove (although you'd really be removing X completely, whereas I need to keep it in). I've gotten close to 50 MB, so I'm sure after removing X completely you could get it lower than that, meaning you'd have a great deal of free space for your servers.

I personally think this is a great idea, and I'd love to use it if I (and my friends) played more PC games and had LAN parties and such.

[miazmaticdotcom]

Well, once it's done (ETA is looking like about 2 - 2.5 weeks right now) I shall throw a box up in the closet and serve those ISOs (over my ADSL pipe, unfortunately.)

[miazmaticdotcom]

Help! I have run into some trouble. I'm using a computer with two optical drives. Into the first I placed my Knoppix 3.3 CD, and booted from it. Then, from the second I copied the contents of the KnoppixQuake CD to to the hard drive (I want to start out from there.) I was about to start working on it, put in chroot /mnt/hda2/knx/source/KNOPPIX, as it had said in the howto in order to work on my remaster. However, instead of chrooting in there, it came back chroot: /bin/bash: No such file or directory

I'm a relative n00b to Linux, any help is appreciated. Earlier, I was able to successfully chroot into a copy of the original Knoppix 3.3 CD in that exact same directory.

Help?