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, but 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)

Caused by: java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 0 at org.lwjgl.opengl.XRandR$Screen.<init>(XRandR.java:234) at org.lwjgl.opengl.XRandR$Screen.<init>(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.<clinit>(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.