Tag Archives: Minecraft

Installing Minecraft on Linux

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Installing everyones favorite game (well okay not everyone) is fairly simple on Linux, as to why you’d want to install it on Linux a lot of players find they get much better performance, especially when you start adding lots of mods.

Java

The first thing you need to do is make sure you have Java installed, this can be done by typing:

java -version

You should get something like this:

java version "1.8.0_66"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_66-b17)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.66-b17, mixed mode)

Mojang recommend that you use the Oracle JVM rather than IcedTea but I’ve not had any  real trouble with it on the latest 1.8.9 version of Minecraft, perhaps slightly slower but that’s all, if Java is not installed do a search for how to install for your particular Linux distribution, for Gentoo simply emerge jre and then oracle-jre-bin.

Installing Minecraft

Go to minecraft.net and download the launcher, once it’s done type:

java -jar Minecraft.jar

Login to your Minecraft account and install the latest, or your preferred version of Minecraft, once it’s done launch, if all is well it should run without problems, if you notice performance problems try the Oracle JVM instead.

Some older Minecraft versions may benefit from updating the included LWJGL library, particularly if you get input issues.