Some of you may be aware that I “maintain” a how to guide for the Live For Speed community, briefly detailing how to run a dedicated server. Within this guide is a section on running it on a Linux based system, under Wine.

As good as this guide is (obviously - as I wrote it :P), there are a few issues that I feel need to be addressed, predominately;

• Most distro's packages of Wine have X.org/XFree86 as a dependancy
• Some older versions of Wine do not work

“Oh”, I hear you say. Many experienced sysadmins dislike running Wine under linux, on a server, because of the associated bloat (i.e. a X server) which is unnecessary. To avoid this it's possible to compile your own version of Wine, without X support. This does restrict you to running programs under wineconsole. In the circumstance of running a dedicated Live For Speed server, this does not matter.

Simply download and compile the latest version of Wine;

./configure
make depend
make
make install

As usual make install will need to be preformed as root (or equivilent). You will also need to ensure that the latest version of the libncurses development package is installed. Under Debian this is libncurses-dev.

Now simply invoke your server, making sure that the /dedicated=invisible, within your configuration file (in this instance, setup.cfg);

wineconsole --backend=curses LFS.exe /cfg=setup.cfg

This will cause Wine to complain about the lack of an X server, but it will run without issue. To ensure the server continues to run after you disconnect, start it under a screen session, or nohup.