# Minecraft launcher in FreeBSD



## phalange (Aug 18, 2020)

There are some old threads about the launcher, but I can't find anything recent. The pkg is an outdated version 1.7.9 and appears to be a no-go with current servers. I also tried running a VM in FreeBSD using a super-minimal Linux guest but it was miserably slow to run the game this way.

Any thoughts?


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## kpedersen (Aug 18, 2020)

How about in Wine?
The VM shouldn't have been too bad if you used Virtualisation like VirtualBox of Bhyve.
Does it run in the Linux compat layer?


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## phalange (Aug 18, 2020)

I used vbox on a T470s. It's the i5 version and only 8G of ram, so not the most powerful. The guest was stripped down NixOS, but gameplay was terribly choppy. Even with the vbox settings pushed (meaning increased GPU memory, 4G ram allotted, 2 CPUs) it was still bad.

I have not tried Linux compat layer. Do you think it would work? Are the necessary libraries available?

I didn't try wine either, but I wanted to see if anyone had tried these things already rather than repeating a failed experiment.


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## ekvz (Aug 21, 2020)

This might be not overly helpful but shouldn't the only problematic parts be the JNI libraries? It's been a long time since i did anything related to to minecraft but i remember the jars containing a couple of generic game/graphic libraries and i also vaguely remember updating them because of some compatibility issue i was facing. This was on Linux but concept wise it should be the same on FreeBSD i guess. If my memory doesn't fail me those libraries were open source and i don't see any obvious reason why one (at least if it's possible to build those on FreeBSD) couldn't switch them to actual FreeBSD native ones and just let Java do it's thing. I am not much into Java though so i might very well be missing something here.


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## phalange (Aug 21, 2020)

ekvz said:


> This might be not overly helpful but shouldn't the only problematic parts be the JNI libraries?



There's a thread here (410308) where someone managed to get the 1.14 launcher working (current is 1.16), and it seems they used lwjgl (along with glfw and openal-soft). I'm not sure if lwjgl (aka Lightweight Java Game Library) is among the JNI libraries you're referring to, but basically I think you're getting at part of it.

Anyway, glfw and openal-soft are both current in FreeBSD ports, and I had no problem upgrading the port of lwjgl to v3.2.3 on my own.

But the Minecraft launcher install broke down. I got all sorts of java errors. I tried running the launcher directly (after extracting it from the tarball), and got through some ELF errors by install Linux compat and loading the modules, but still wound up stalled and I had to put it aside for a the moment.

I'm not sure if I need to run the launcher in Linux compat, or since it's Java I can just run it with native FreeBSD tools.


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## ekvz (Aug 21, 2020)

phalange said:


> There's a thread here (410308) where someone managed to get the 1.14 launcher working (current is 1.16), and it seems they used lwjgl (along with glfw and openal-soft). I'm not sure if lwjgl (aka Lightweight Java Game Library) is among the JNI libraries you're referring to, but basically I think you're getting at part of it.



Yes, exactly those names ring a bell.



phalange said:


> But the Minecraft launcher install broke down. I got all sorts of java errors. I tried running the launcher directly (after extracting it from the tarball), and got through some ELF errors by install Linux compat and loading the modules, but still wound up stalled and I had to put it aside for a the moment.
> 
> I'm not sure if I need to run the launcher in Linux compat, or since it's Java I can just run it with native FreeBSD tools.



Well, to be perfectly honest i can't remember much about the launcher itself and i don't have any installation at hand to take a look. It's just that in my opinion the only thing that would need linux compatibility is the JNI libraries since as you said Java should just run. In theory it could/should also be possible to replace the JNI libraries shipped with minecraft with FreeBSD ones (.jar is just a glorified zipfile afterall - if you didn't know that already) and avoid the need for compatibility completely.

It's hard to say if that would actually fix your problem but given that it should be the only platform dependent part it might be worth investigating. I just wouldn't waste to much time on it in case the actual problem is really elsewhere (i remember minecraft to be very picky when it came to those libraries and trying to get them right wasn't fun at all).


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## Alexander88207 (Aug 21, 2020)

By the way  : Could it be that you are confusing the launcher version with the game version?

1.7.9 is the version of the old launcher not of the game itself. The launcher itself cannot be updated anymore because they have stopped to ship these kind of standalone .Jar launcher. I would stick to games/multimc


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## phalange (Aug 22, 2020)

Alexander88207 said:


> By the way  : Could it be that you are confusing the launcher version with the game version?
> 
> 1.7.9 is the version of the old launcher not of the game itself. The launcher itself cannot be updated anymore because they have stopped to ship these kind of standalone .Jar launcher. I would stick to games/multimc



Unless I'm missing something, there's a name overlap. The current Minecraft Java game, aka the client, is called the Minecraft Launcher because it's really just a front end that downloads the current version of the client software when in starts.

Multimc is also called a launcher, and perhaps more appropriately since it just gathers all the worlds into one GUI and allows a user to select. It's not a replacement for the minecraft launcher (client), but rather kind of manager.


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