Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am setting up a MineCraft server on Linux. Let’s get started.
First off, WOW! I never would have expected it. I had heard Android was a version of Linux before, but, WOW! So, Ubuntu MATE is designed to be beginner friendly and easy for Windows users to find their way around, but there are still some “cultural differences.” The first of these cultural differences I is the file system. Where Windows has their C drive, Linux might have /dev/sda/ or something else. I don’t have it figured out yet, but it apparently can let someone know what partition of what drive they are looking in. The other major difference I noticed is the Software Boutique. It looks just like a miniature version of Android’s Play Store would if it were meant for a desktop. Only now when I look it up do I find that it’s a relatively new feature.
The aforementioned Software Boutique is where you get your programs. Windows users are in the habit of going out and downloading programs from online, hopefully from a trustworthy source. If you end up with something less than honest, your virus scanner will hopefully catch it before it can do any damage.
Good Linux users are in the habit of using package managers. All I know about them so far is that they are databases of trusted software that can also keep your software up to date with spontaneous security patches and things. That brings up the other comparison, security. Windows is the big target when making viruses. Linux was designed with security in mind, and it isn’t the go to OS for most desktop users. Both factors make it less tempting to aim at Linux when building a virus. Long story short, if you maintain good habits when playing with Linux, you don’t need to run a virus scanner.
Another thing I noticed, performance. When Windows 7 was running on there, It was chugging along as if burdened by old age. Now, I’d say it’s running like a middle-aged system. It has its slowdowns, sure, but that was running two clients of MineCraft off internal graphics. I think this computer will do nicely for my purposes.
This brings me over to setting up a MineCraft server. The client was happy with OpenJDK, the free and open source version of Java. When looking through the Software Boutique, I spotted the server and grabbed that. Too bad it wasn’t as care-free as it’s resource happy counterpart, Client. So far, I have learned that I will need to assemble a .bat file to put the server files where I want them. If only I knew how to do it, I could be done in 30 seconds…. The thing about obsolete tutorials, though, I’m going to need to assemble my own instruction set.
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OK… It looks like I am learning about bash files and the command line before I get too far.
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I have seen things I rightfully shouldn’t know until about a year from now. Too much to rightly cover. All I wanted to do was automatically start and stop the server after startup and before shutdown respectively.
Backing up a little, I got onto a help session with another Linux user. I don’t remember his screen name, but he advised me that not all software need be downloaded from a software repository. Big enough names, like MineCraft, should be safe enough to download directly
On that note, I used Firefox to download Discord as well, and was given a package file to deal with. It was either that or a tar.gz file I wasn’t sure what to do with, even after looking up the format.
Looking up server automation techniques, I came across powerful features that, after thinking about it, might have ruined my system if I played around with them too much. I kind of felt like I was staring into an active reactor, knowing I could stick my hand in to either disrupt everything, or find out nothing happened after all. For the curious, Linux has a different Runlevel for various functions, such as boot up, shutdown, restart, single-user, etc. At this point in my exploration, I had to gather most of my information from bits and pieces from scattered around forums and the like, so I don’t have any links to share. I did come across a few terms, many of which are obviously important, yet none of which I have fully sorted out/differentiated. I’ll just be happy to get my Spigot MineCraft server running and updating, then I think I’ll call it a week; scripting can wait, I have a more hands on project for next week.
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The Spigot server is up. It turns out it had nothing to do with packages. When I first went through the process of getting the tools to compile the server, I accidentally disregarded the file I was in. All the mess ended up on my desktop. I sent the offending files to the trash and redownloaded and recompiled in a special folder for building such files: a ‘factory’ so to speak.
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There is still much to explore with just this one distro. After I get a little more comfortable looking at the foreign grammar that is that which is used in the Linux terminal, I’m planning on reevaluating the lazy computer. I see two likely paths for it. After redoing its thermal paste, I’m planning on moving it over to Ubuntu and leaving it running for a few days, possibly under stress test conditions. If it holds up, I will move it in as my toy desktop and my current toy desktop gets moved to a server version to run the family’s MineCraft worlds. On the other hand, If the stress test fails, I can see the computer being parted. I know its BlueRay reader is superior to my current DVD reader. The Ubuntu machine has already inherited its old screen and speakers, which were surround sound, if there was a discrete sound card. I ended up pulling the rear speakers from the setup because they were buzzing otherwise.
I learned a lot this week, and I will say: it pays to know what it is you are supposedly doing. A series of instructions may be just someone’s preference or the way things must be done. If you ever find yourself maintaining anything, go ahead and learn a little bit more about it. You might pick up a few new tricks. Final Questions: Do you play MineCraft? If so, what was the version you started playing? And do you run a server?
At this point, I went into various fuzzily related details to create suspense, such as how I couldn’t find my other SATA cable or how I didn’t have the correct mounting for my case for this HDD. I yanked the unformatted SSD and connected the HDD and let it rest just outside the case. (The picture is from just now, not then.) Anyway, at one point, the drive was putting its weight on the power cable, so I started turning it over. My father cringed as I slowly rotated the box to avoid too strong of a gyroscopic effect on the spinning disks. He told me that Hard drives used to be sensitive to the orientation they were in when they were first formatted: they must not have had as good motor control for the read heads. While this is an aging HDD, it isn’t 90’s technology, the latest example cited as not being up to being turned on end.