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$Screen.&lt;init&gt;(XRandR.java:234) at
org.lwjgl.opengl.XRandR$Screen.&lt;init&gt;(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.&lt;clinit&gt;(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.