Minecraft server on a eeePC

Intro

This tutorial is for getting a minecraft server running on Linux.

I originally made this for the Raspberry Pi, but since my model was the earlier Model-B with only 265MB ram, it wasn’t enough to run the server. Here, I have modified the tutorial for the net install (minimal) version of Debian Linux. The only thing I added during the install process was ssh. When prompted, don’t bother installing things like a web server etc… You don’t actually need ssh, but I find it convinient for my pruposes.

I hear minecraft servers require a good ammount of memory to run (even if the server is just for you and a few friends). It doesn’t require much processing power though. Like I mentioned earlier, I got this up and running on a moderatly overclicked raspberry pi with 256mb of memory, but it would fail after a few moments with just one user. My current succsessful setup is on an old eeePC 701 with 2GB ram. This tutorial expects you have Debian Linux installed, but most other linux systems would probably be fine too.

Another important thing to note is bandwidth allowance. Checkout this page to estimate how many users you can host: http://canihostaminecraftserver.com/

Setup

Log in as root (su). Get Oricle’s JDK —see http://www.webupd8.org/2014/03/how-to-install-oracle-java-8-in-debian.html for more info.

Follow the intructions there. While you are logged in as root, grab git too.

apt-get install git-core 

Next, sign out of root and with your regular user account, create a folder for your minecraft server and cd into it

mkdir minecraft
cd minecraft

Next you’ll need Spigot. Simply put, Spigot is the most widely-used modded Minecraft server software in the world. [Link].

Spigot uses a program called BuildTools to get and build the latest version of the server from GitHub (this is why we downloaded git earlier).

So to get BuildTools

wget https://hub.spigotmc.org/jenkins/job/BuildTools/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/target/BuildTools.jar

BuildTools.jar shound now be in ~/minecraft

Next run BuildTools to build your minecraft server (this may take some time).

java -jar BuildTools.jar

Launch the server.

Depending on how much memory your server has, you’ll need to change the Xms and Xmx memory allocation. Xms is the memory allocated to starting up Java, and Xmx is the memory allocated once something is running on it (I think).

java -Xms1024M -Xmx1024M -jar /home/$USER/minecraft/spigot.jar nogui

Note: These values are system specific. Change them to meet the requirements of your system. The minecraft server is now running.

Plugins

Note: Before installing any plugins, make sure you’ve run the server succssfully once. This will create a plugins folder for you to install your server plugins.

To keep the server running smoothly, install this plugin

cd ~/minecraft/plugins
wget http://ci.shadowvolt.com/job/NoSpawnChunks/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/target/NoSpawnChunks.jar

Post install

Before you actually play on the server, you obviously have to open a port on your router — the default port is 25565 (allow both TCP and UDP).

Admin commands

Use these commands “as is” in the Linux command line or prefix with / if you are an admin in the game.

op yourself with the command

op [your minecraft username]

To stop, type either into the command line or in the game if you are op

stop or /stop

More commands can be found here

Configuration

Open the config file in ~/minecraft

nano server.properties

Some settings you may want to change

server-name=A Debian Bukkit Server
max-players=4
motd=A Minecraft Server