Installing BF1942 server on linux

Its an old one but good, here’s how to install Battlefield 1942 on a linux server..

First you have to download the relevant files which is easier said than done since many of the download links no longer work! To find them go here..

http://games.ea.com/official/battlefield/1942/us/gamedemo.jsp?state=010010

There you will see at the top this link to download the latest patch so download that..

ftp://largedownloads.ea.com/pub/misc/bf1942-update-1.61.tar.gz

Then scroll down that page to the end and you will find several download links under “Linux Server Download Links” which is the full server package so download from whichever one of those is still working.

Upload both files to your server somewhere (ie. /home/someuser ) and unzip first the full server package (with ‘tar xzvf bf1942..’) which creates a directory ‘bf1942’ and then on top of that unzip the patch (tar xzvf bf1942-update-1.61.tar.gz) – make sure you do this in the same directory where the full bf1942 package was unzipped as it overwrites some of the files – check the file UPDATE-1.61-INSTALL.txt for details.

Ok now its time to try running it – the program to run is cunningly called bf1942_lnxded-1.6-rc2.run

chmod 755 bf1942_lnxded-1.6-rc2.run

./bf1942_lnxded-1.6-rc2.run

Then follow the prompts. Did it work? Great if it did you’re good to go but if you get ‘permission denied’ check if you have ‘exec’ enabled on your /tmp directory as the installer extracts and runs another script there. If exec is not enabled its no problem – just create a temporary tmp directory somewhere else such as /home/someuser/tmp and then edit the run file and put that new path in the TMP line which you will see near the top. Now try running the run script again and it should work this time.

Now you can edit the config file under mods/bf1942/settings/serversettings.con and set things like internet=1 and whatever else is relevant to you.

Open the the necessary firewall ports: 14567, 14690, 23000 should do it but depends on your requirements and config settings.

Now you can start the server using screen like so.

screen ./start.sh +statusMonitor 1

Thats it – you should be able to connect now and start playing!

To exit screen and leave the server running do this..

ctrl+a ctrl+d

Then to reattach the screen later do this..

screen -r

Enjoy!