Junior family member had knocked the cable just far enough out of the monitor to prevent xrandr showing anything useful, even though the system had booted and selected the resolution correctly, and everything was displaying as expected.
But Minecraft refused to start, just never appeared.
Eventually found this in the Minecraft log:
java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
at ave.ar(SourceFile:560)
at ave.am(SourceFile:361)
at ave.a(SourceFile:310)
at net.minecraft.client.main.Main.main(SourceFile:124)
Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.lwjgl.opengl.LinuxDisplay.getAvailableDisplayModes(LinuxDisplay.java:947)
at org.lwjgl.opengl.LinuxDisplay.init(LinuxDisplay.java:738)
at org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.<clinit>(Display.java:138)
... 4 more
Which led me to try xrandr:
$ xrandr -q
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 16384 x 16384
VGA-1 disconnected primary (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-2 disconnected 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm
1920x1080 (0x46) 148.500MHz +HSync +VSync
h: width 1920 start 2008 end 2052 total 2200 skew 0 clock 67.50KHz
v: height 1080 start 1084 end 1089 total 1125 clock 60.00Hz
Eventually I gave up googling and checked the monitor cable... tightened it up, xrandr is happy and so is Minecraft (and the Minecraft player):
$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 16384 x 16384
VGA-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-2 connected 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 477mm x 268mm
1920x1080 60.00*+
1600x1200 60.00
1680x1050 59.88
1400x1050 59.95
1280x1024 75.02 60.02
1440x900 59.90
1280x960 60.00
1152x864 75.00
1024x768 75.03 70.07 60.00
832x624 74.55
800x600 72.19 75.00 60.32 56.25
640x480 75.00 72.81 66.67 59.94
720x400 70.08
This is Ubuntu 20.04, Minecraft is 1.8.9 and has loaded this lwjgl:
~/.minecraft/libraries/org/lwjgl/lwjgl/lwjgl/2.9.4-nightly-20150209/lwjgl-2.9.4-nightly-20150209.jar
OK, so this is an unlikely edge case on an old version and unlikely to get updated, maybe the newer code handles this better already, but maybe this report will help guide someone else hitting the same issue to resolve the problem much quicker than it's take me to!
And if it's possible to make future versions handle this error more gracefully, then so much the better.
Junior family member had knocked the cable just far enough out of the monitor to prevent xrandr showing anything useful, even though the system had booted and selected the resolution correctly, and everything was displaying as expected.
But Minecraft refused to start, just never appeared.
Eventually found this in the Minecraft log:
Which led me to try
xrandr:Eventually I gave up googling and checked the monitor cable... tightened it up, xrandr is happy and so is Minecraft (and the Minecraft player):
This is Ubuntu 20.04, Minecraft is 1.8.9 and has loaded this lwjgl:
OK, so this is an unlikely edge case on an old version and unlikely to get updated, maybe the newer code handles this better already, but maybe this report will help guide someone else hitting the same issue to resolve the problem much quicker than it's take me to!
And if it's possible to make future versions handle this error more gracefully, then so much the better.