Running the Minecraft demo in Linux

I always wanted to see how Minecraft would run on my machine, but unfortunately the only demo version available is this old one for Windows.

Since the game is written in java, I wanted to see if I could get it to run under Linux anyways...

First I ran the demo installer using Wine.

The game itself is packaged as a Windows executable using the Launch4J. It turns out that one can simply unpack these Launch4J exe files using file-roller.

After unpacking the exe file (in the same directory where I installed the demo), I found a bunch of obfuscated class files. I tried to start them all (ie "java a" etc.), until I found some suitable ones: hz.class and k.class (both seem to work, I don't know what the difference is).

Both of these threw an exception because LWJGL could not be found.

I downloaded the current release of LWJGL, and the game started, but got stuck on the logo screen (apparently during sound initialization?).

I then installed the liblwjgl-java package from Debian and it finally worked.

Here is the wrapper script I ended up with.

The game (or at least this old version) is playable on my Intel G31 integrated graphics machine, but only on the lowest graphics settings :-/