Minecraft Installer

Introduction

minecraft-installer is a package for Debian and Ubuntu which downloads and installs the official Minecraft client. It creates an item in the menu and depends on the relevant Java packages so that everything you need is installed automatically.

Download

This package has been tested on the amd64 version of Ubuntu Maverick and the amd64 version of Debian Lenny, however, it should work on any architecture with a recent version of Debian or Ubuntu:

APT Repository

The easiest way to install this software is to add my APT repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list file - simply append these two lines to the bottom of the file:

deb http://archive.grahamedgecombe.com stable main
deb-src http://archive.grahamedgecombe.com stable main

You'll also need to add my GPG public key if you don't want any warnings:

curl http://grahamedgecombe.com/graham.asc >graham.asc
sudo apt-key add graham.asc
rm -f graham.asc

Then install it in the usual manner - for the client package:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install minecraft-installer

and for the server package:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install minecraft-server-installer

Right now the APT repository only has the amd64 and i386 architectures, so if you want to use one of the more obscure architectures which Debian is available on you'll have to download and install the .deb files manually.

.debs

These .deb files can be installed with gdebi or dpkg -i:

minecraft-installer

minecraft-server-installer

minecraft-server-installer_1.4_all.deb (recommended)

However, I strongly recommend using the APT repository so you can receive updates easily.

Code

The code is currently hosted on GitHub and the installer/package code is available under the GNU General Public License.

Credits

Martin Erik Werner submitted a large set of patches which added the minecraft-server-installer package and also improved the existing packaging.