Games running on headless server?

[Div]

I have a powerful linux server running without monitor, assume I have installed X11 and required drivers etc, will I be able to stream games from my server to my laptop?

[worthLESS]

X11 is OSX right? Games that can run on linux, or OSX you might be able to stream but most games in the steam library require Windows, so that is the first problem I see with trying to stream from that server.

[Div]

X11 is the windows system for Linux.

Originally posted by Bran187:

X11 is OSX right? Games that can run on linux, or OSX you might be able to stream but most games in the steam library require Windows, so that is the first problem I see with trying to stream from that server.

[🐶 Halfy]

That sounds like it could work. I havn't run X11 headless before but it it certainly possible. The issue is if you wanted to divert graphics card processing power over the network rather than to a screen.

[ethan.c2h6]

One issue you may encounter is that by default X11 won't run on startup (on Ubuntu at least) if a monitor isn't detected as plugged in on startup. If I remember correctly you need to force a default in xorg.conf to specify resolution bit depth etc.

This is for Fedora but should be applicable to most xorg setups.

http://serverfault.com/questions/148491/how-can-i-start-an-x11-session-on-my-headless-fedora-13-server

[Person]

Um yes but you'll only be able to stream Linux games. If I'm not mistaken the entire point of this is to be able to stream Windows games to Mac/Linux systems which can't play them natively.

[Roblabla]

I see no reason why it wouldn't work. So long as X11 is running, having no monitor attached doesn't change much, the GPU still does the rendering.

[Roblabla]

Originally posted by SQLi:

Um yes but you'll only be able to stream Linux games. If I'm not mistaken the entire point of this is to be able to stream Windows games to Mac/Linux systems which can't play them natively.

Or stream games from a powerful pc (that could potentially run linux) to a bad pc (like a cheap box plugged to a TV)

[Phunky]

I'd expect you'll be able to stream from any steam client to any other steam client, the only restriction of what you can stream will be based on the OS as you'll need to be able to actual play the game to stream it.

If you've actually got decent GPU performance on the server then GPU Passthrough would be a good option for you.

http://nimbledais.com/?p=21

But home many servers actually have decent GPUs? Unless you're bitcoin mining ;)

[s0litaire]

Running a headless Windows machine is easy just make sure you have a good remote desktop app installed.

Headless Linux would be nearly useless in this situation as most of the games you'll want to stream will be Windows based (And NO SteamOS won't play Windows games out of the box, Valve don't have a super-secret way to run windows games without installing Windows OS!)

If you go with a Linux server then you'll have to do the hard work off installing wine and all the required tweaking to get games to run poorly. or install a Virtual Machine to run Windows in. Which would be silly resource wise! may as well just install windows on to the server and remove a lot of hassle and performance issues.

[G-Man]

Originally posted by s0litaire:

Headless Linux would be nearly useless in this situation as most of the games you'll want to stream will be Windows based (And NO SteamOS won't play Windows games out of the box, Valve don't have a super-secret way to run windows games without installing Windows OS!)

But they do have a not-so-secret one.
http://www.winehq.org/about/
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=19444

[ReBoot]

Originally posted by Gen:

Originally posted by s0litaire:

Headless Linux would be nearly useless in this situation as most of the games you'll want to stream will be Windows based (And NO SteamOS won't play Windows games out of the box, Valve don't have a super-secret way to run windows games without installing Windows OS!)

But they do have a not-so-secret one.
http://www.winehq.org/about/
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=19444

So you want to run Wine to run Steam on your streaming server? Sure, could work.

[Phunky]

Performance would be shocking with wine, if you really want to do it on linux get GPU Passthrough + Windows VM setup and you'll have near native performance.

[ReBoot]

Originally posted by Phunky:

Performance would be shocking with wine, if you really want to do it on linux get GPU Passthrough + Windows VM setup and you'll have near native performance.

Which would be way more complicated than just running Windows.

[timeforpoptarts]

Fedora 20 has technology support for Wayland. Even though the current version of the Wayland protocol doesn't support remote compositing its in the future roadmap.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_(display_server_protocol)

[G-Man]

Originally posted by Phunky:

Performance would be shocking with wine, if you really want to do it on linux get GPU Passthrough + Windows VM setup and you'll have near native performance.

It's not a VM. It's native. Wine is a string of custom libraries that literally take Windows input and give linux output to linux. The equivalent of rewriting DirectX, Win32 APIs etc to sit on top of Linux drivers and kernel etc. Theres no background processes or emulated computer underneath, just the application and it's commands being literally translated to linux ones of the fly. If it runs, it runs like it's native at full hardware speed, much faster than passtrough with a VM, which is actually quite slow.

Steam does not have to launch in 'Windows mode' or even touch it's Linux or OS X version on that level, there are many "Ports" out there that are basically using Wine to translate the Windows version of a game already. What steam can do is install and launch a "bottle", which is a predesigned environment (you can select your bottle to replicateany version of Windows, XP, Vista, 7, 8 etc) basically composed of these translation DLLs that are seen by the game as normal Windows ones but actually translate whatever is sent to them to Linux/OpenGL data and pass it on to Linux hardware libraries.

Have a look at crossover's compatibility list, a commercial release of Wine that does all the technical bits of preconfiguring Wine to work on OS X (and it's UNIX core). Any game that works for crossover works for Wine as it's Wine's code in Crossover. Wine devs have estimated that the max slowdown you can experience in your "Wineskinned game" from Wine vs real Windows is 3%, the problem is that it doesn't work on games that utilize XNA, certain forms of .NET or anything that hasn't been reverse engineered by the open source Wine community yet.

http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxgames/

And for those who won't look at linkies here's a list of the first few on the page.

Civ5, GuildWars, Diablo 3, Perfect World, Rift, SC2, Skyrim. I even own a Wineskinned (out of the box) Mac copy of X3:Albion Prelude and Wineskinned EVE:Online. (Wineskinning is basically making an environment for a program individually) Devs can and will fix that if Linux/SteamOS gets off the ground.