Launching Minecraft from Desura for Linux. Thread - Minecraft

I just discovered Desura for Linux a couple of nights ago, but was disappointed to see that you can only add external games with an .EXE extention.

Out of sheer curiousity I made a small shell script (called minecraft.exe) that sits in my Minecraft folder that executes the java command. I realise that perhaps a symbolic link might work, but as I am relatively inexperienced compared with the majority of Linux users out there I decided to stick with what I know.

I suppose this would also apply to any other games you may have that are not support by Desura at this time and do not have the .exe extention.

1. Create the dummy file.
Create a new file called "minecraft.exe" with your favourite text editor wherever you like to launch programs from. As there are multiple accounts on this computer I run all my games from a single location in my /home folder: /home/j/games.

2. Edit the file to contain the commands need to run minecraft .jar
Edit the blank file to read something along these lines:

Someone wrote: #!/bin/bash
# Change this path to point at your minecraft.jar
java -jar /home/j/games/Minecraft/minecraft.jar

3. Make the file executable
Using chmod, make the dummy file you just created executable;

Someone wrote: chmod +x
/home/j/games/Minecraft/minecraft.exe

You can test the file to see if it runs correctly by typing the location of the new file in a terminal. If you works, great! If you get an error stating "Unable to access jarfile ./minecraft.jar", make sure you've written out the full path correctly.
4. Add a custom Minecraft entry in Desura.

Go to "Support" in the Desura app, then click on the 'Games' subheading. You should be able to enter a link name and point it in the direction of your newly
created 'minecraft.exe' file. Hit save and if all went correctly, you should be able to see Minecraft sitting snuggly in your ever-expanding list of Linux native games

5. Build!
Launch the game, have fun and get creative in Minecraft!

EDIT: I tend to be quite 'backwards' when it comes to computing, so if there is a cleaner way to launch Minecraft, I apologize in advance!

Edited by: Jambones

Awesome! Will try it out soon on Xubuntu 11.10 64-bit and let you know how it goes. Thanks for the info!

From what I can tell, you don't actually need the .exe script.

Rather than pointing the link EXE to the script, point it to /usr/bin/java (or the output of "which java"). Then, in the user launch options, add "-jar ", plus any launch options like -Xmx1536M -Xms512M. It should run fine, calling java as the program, with minecraft as the jar-file.