Running Minecraft Server on a Linode Debian Instance If you are having issues following the official wiki then you are not alone - I found it much too generic and could not get the 'init.d' startup script to work. Following is a step by step guide to quickly set up your on game server running on Debian/Ubuntu distribution. Install Java We are going to install OpenJDK which for all intents and purposes is equivalent to Sun java but without licensing issues. Execute below commands under root or using sudo. # aptitude update # aptitude install openjdk-6-jre-headless Download and Install Minecraft Server We are going to download and install into '/usr/local/minecraft' as per the Debian FilesystemHierarchyStandard. # mkdir /usr/local/minecraft # cd /usr/local/minecraft/ # wget http://dl.bukkit.org/latest-rb/craftbukkit.jar We are installing the bukkit minecraft version rather then the vanilla one, it is fully comptabible with the vanilla server but lets your run