Hi
I know of no books on this specific subject, maybe I should write one...
Linux is very stable if set up on stable hardware.
Linux will do almost any gameserver app you can find, usualy even ones that are said to be unable to run under Linux. They said that Tribes:Vengeance would never run under Linux as a gameserver or client. Wrong. There are a few Linux T:V servers out there, tho no clients that I know of. Wine takes care of that pretty much. Wine (means = Wine Is Not Emulation) takes windows calls and redirects them to an equivalent Linux call that will do, more or less, what the call requires. The gameserver app knows none the better (yay!). If you want a real challenge, get games running under FreeBSD.
For specifics you will do a lot of googling for linux gameserver or similar headings, then copy all the info and sift thru it. Guess one would concentrate on Q3, UT, and some of the other popular game engines, Q3 and UT being what most any gameserver app uses as its core. Some gameserver apps have utilities you can use to administrate the game settings easily, but if you can set things up with notepad or wordpad you might find more options that can be tweaked. In Linux you'd probably be using vi to edit everything. Keep in mind that some gameserver apps may require a console up or they won't run. This happens in the case of Tribes (probably my fav game), the gameserver console must be up or the app won't run at all. What this means is that you might want to install x even if you don't think that you'll need it. If you don't have the hardware to run x and the server app you don't have enough hardware. On the opposite hand, if you have a gameserver app that runs without a console up, you can save yourself a video card as you can administrate the server remotely. This is nice to have, but opens up security breach opportunities if there are holes in ssh or whatever you use to get into the server.
Maybe someday there will be a Linux distro out that is specificaly targetted as a gameserver, nothing but core os and networking, plus wine or whatever it needs to fool win32 apps. This would be nice since you wouldn't have to spend an eternity turning off/uninstalling all the crap that a typical distro enables as default. If you want to get crazy, get Gentoo or a similar distro that lets you control at install what is installed in the first place. This is time consuming and can end up "not fun" if you get hung up somewhere in the process.
Jump in and see how far you can get!
(I really should write a book)
