1. Linux beta RC2 ready for Steam testing Apr 22, 20:22 Leon Hartwig

RC2 is ready for Linux testing. It is only being released as an upgrade (it's pretty small), so you'll need to have RC1 installed first. RC2 includes the following changes:

- Logging is fixed.
- Steam clients will be properly authenticated and receive a Steam ID.

Several other things are different with hlds_l, beginning with this beta. First, the package is no longer distributed as a tar/gz file. Instead, it is distributed as a .bin file that needs to be directly executed. So, after downloading the file, make it executable and then execute it. For example:

chmod a+x hlds_l_3109rc2_upgrade.bin
./hlds_l_3109rc2_upgrade.bin

You will be presented with a EULA (Yeah, ugh, I know ) after which the package will automatically extract itself into a hlds_l directory.

The second change is that hlds_run is now a shell script rather than an executable object file. The script will execute the object file. Using the new script, the syntax for starting your server is exactly the same as before. There are a couple of reasons for the new script. The script sets up your LD_LIBRARY_PATH path, so you should no longer have to worry about installing our shared libraries (e.g. libhlwon.so), they'll work fine right where the package extracts them. The second is we have added an auto-restart ability, so if your server crashes or shuts down, it will come back up automatically. To use this feature, add -restart to your hlds_run command line. For those of you that are already using your own custom start/restart scripts, you do not have to use this new one. Just change your old scripts to execute the 'hlds' file instead of 'hlds_run'.

The third change is that there is a new shared library included in the package, libSteamValidateUserIDTickets.so. If you use our new hlds_run script, you shouldn't need to install this library anywhere else in your system. This particular library is the reason the Linux port has taken so long, and our major concern with this release is making sure that this library works OK for everyone (if your server starts up OK, then it most likely works ).

Please let us know ASAP if you have any problems with this new release, because the final release depends on this new stuff working correctly for everyone.

Here is the information needed to obtain the new beta:

ftp.valvesoftware.com
login: hlserver
pass: hlserver

Directory: Beta/Steam/Linux

FILE: hlds_l_3109rc2_upgrade.bin
MD5: 884ae0fc50e323a1fcde4c91e3fe1bbb