Notes on installing Minecraft on Linux

18 Oct 2018

Installing Minecraft on Ubuntu need a few tweaks, especially for those who have trouble accessing Amazon AWS.

Download installer: http://s3.amazonaws.com/Minecraft.Download/launcher/Minecraft.jar (From link on page https://minecraft.net/en-us/download/). For those in China, use a VPN.
Install Oracle JRE first. Though OpenJRE seems to be working ok, problems still might arise. Download the JRE at https://java.com/. No need to download the full JDK.
To install minecraft, run Minecraft.jar with the following command:
```
$ORACLE_JRE"/java" -jar Minecraft.jar --workDir=$MINECRAFT_HOME
```
You can also specify a proxy with flags proxyHost, proxyUser, proxyPass and proxyPort. For example:
```
$ORACLE_JRE"/java" -jar Minecraft.jar --workDir=$MINECRAFT_HOME --proxyHost 127.0.0.1 --proxyPort 1080
```
For those in China, please use a proxy as the installer would need to access amazonaws.com as well.
Start the launcher.jar binary using the Oracle JRE binary java in its bin folder. All the flags of the installer are supported.
Set the working directory for minecraft. I don’t want stuff to start clogging up in $HOME/.minecraft.

My workflow:

ORACLE_JRE="/home/mengyibai/Software/jre1.8.0_171/bin" 
MINECRAFT_HOME="/media/mengyibai/Data/Minecraft"  # Anywhere you like
proxychains wget "http://s3.amazonaws.com/Minecraft.Download/launcher/Minecraft.jar"
$ORACLE_JRE"/java" -jar Minecraft.jar --workDir=$MINECRAFT_HOME --proxyHost 127.0.0.1 --proxyPort 1080
# Installing, lalala
$ORACLE_JRE"/java" -jar $MINECRAFT_HOME"/launcher.jar" --workDir=$MINECRAFT_HOME --proxyHost 127.0.0.1 --proxyPort 1080
# Playing, lalala