Having just purchased Minecraft I tried running it on Ubuntu but after logging in all I had was a black screen. Running the file in a terminal (java -jar minecraft.jar) showed me the error message was to do with libjawt.so so I ran:
locate libjawt.so
To see if I could find where it is located. I have several JRE installed so there were a few available. I then created a little shell script to run minecraft setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH as appropriate so the libjawt.so file could be found:
#!/bin/bash
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-i386/jre/lib/i386/"
/opt/jre1.7.0_09/bin/java -jar minecraft.jar
I then created a launcher with an icon.
To avoid using the shell script a more permanent solution would be to create the following file:
sudo gedit /etc/ld.so.conf.d/minecraft.conf
And in the file place the path to the libraries required, for me that would be:
/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-i386/jre/lib/i386/
