Minecraft exception in linux

I finally decided to install Minecraft on my new shiny Toshiba Portege z830.
Ubuntu ships with an open-source version of Java, which did run Minecraft, but the graphics were terrible, even on the lowest settings. There were artefacts everywhere!

So as recommended, I switched to the official JRE. Now the login screen works, but that’s about it. After logging in, I just got a black screen and the following exception in the console:

Exception in thread "Minecraft main thread"
java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError at
net.minecraft.client.Minecraft.a(SourceFile:180) at
net.minecraft.client.Minecraft.run(SourceFile:648) at
java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:662)<div class="de2">Caused by: java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 0 at
org.lwjgl.opengl.XRandR$Screen.<init>(XRandR.java:234) at
org.lwjgl.opengl.XRandR$Screen.<init>(XRandR.java:196) at
org.lwjgl.opengl.XRandR.populate(XRandR.java:87) at
org.lwjgl.opengl.XRandR.access$100(XRandR.java:52)at
org.lwjgl.opengl.XRandR$1.run(XRandR.java:110) at
java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at
org.lwjgl.opengl.XRandR.getConfiguration(XRandR.java:108) at
org.lwjgl.opengl.LinuxDisplay.init(LinuxDisplay.java:618) at
org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.<clinit>(Display.java:135)
... 3 more

After discussing the problem in IRC, the solution was quite simple. It turns out lwjgl is a “Light Weight Java Game Library” and the version I had wasn’t behaving.
On the advice of the helpful IRC’ers, I downloaded the latest lwjgl from here (which at time of writing is 2.8.3) to get it all to work nicely.

To install it, I downloaded the zip file, extracted it to a temporary directory, then copied across these files:

cp lwjgl-2.8.3/jar/lwjgl.jar ~/.minecraft/bin
cp lwjgl-2.8.3/native/linux/* ~/.minecraft/bin/natives

Done! Now it works nicely.

Minecraft exception in linux

February 02, 2012

Search and replace, vim and git

Using netrw instead of NERDTree for Vim

Different author email addresses per git repository