Sys Admin Guide

So, You've Decided to Start a Quake 3: Arena Server.

This guide will help you get started.

You will need a legitimate copy of Quake 3: Arena. It is currently only available through Steam on Windows or if you'd like it on-disc second-hand markets like Ebay may have copies.

Once you have the game downloaded, copy pak0.pk3 to your server's baseq3 directory.

Linux

1. Create a new user for your ioquake3 server to run as. You can usually use the command sudo adduser ioq3srv for example to add a new user named ioq3srv
2. Switch to the new user su - ioq3srv
3. Download server_compile.sh wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ioquake/ioq3/master/misc/linux/server_compile.sh
4. Install any pre-requisites as root according to your distribution documentation. If you run into trouble here, please ask for help on our forums after attempting the next command and saving the output to pastebin
5. sh server_compile.sh
6. Copy pak0.pk3 to the baseq3 sub-directory of ioquake3

Mac OS X

Windows