The thing now is, that factorio looks for the savegame in /opt/factorio/data/saves , and obviously there is no savegame.
Upload a savegame and you are good to go. And don't forget the .zip at the end of the savegame name when calling it with --start-server.

So I gambled with those config files ...

So I gambled with those config files multiple hours without any success. It would be awesome, if the headless tarball would contain a config.ini with default values.

If someone might provide his or her config.ini for the headless server, I'd be very thankful. I'd also be thankful for every other ...

Well, it's looking for the game files in /usr/share/factorio, but you installed it in /opt/factorio. What's in your /opt/factorio/config/config.ini? You – or that script – have probably changed read-data in config.ini to point to /usr/share/factorio, which is why the game is so confused. Changing ...

Hello there,

I am running a virtual UbuntuServer machine running 14.04.

I want to run factorio as a headless server on that machine. I tried it according to the wiki and some information I found on this board.

I un-tar-ed the tarball to /opt/factorio , the init-script to /opt/factorio-init and ...