Minecraft Flash Drive Challenge

I've been looking into this for a while, building a bootable flash drive that will run minecraft. I'm aiming for the smallest possible filesize and memory usage so that it will work on more computers. What I have come up with:

Operating System: Linux
Distribution: Slax
Size: 250 MB
Description: Basically I took Slax, and trimmed down everything but the basics. It still, however, has many utilities, and can still display and edit text, browse the web and other simple tasks. The size is small enough that the entire system can get loaded into the ram of (my) computer, while still having a lot of room to spare for minecraft. I'm working on a way to easily keep minecraft installed since the operating system doesn't save changes between boots (its running from the ram).

Can anyone do better? I'm curious what the simplest build is for running minecraft.

Well. Machine code, obviously. Also, do you know about Minecraft 4k?

But thats not full minecraft. The idea is that you have a working version of minecraft 1.2.4 on the smallest amount of operating system and programs as possible. This also might be a huge lag fix, consider running minecraft without WINDOWS running in the background.

I also had to install a nvidia driver to get minecraft to work, but thats only another ~30 MB so its still under 300MB. If you want to try it out, download the operating system from here http://www.slax.org/build.php using
my build file. download the tar its 250MB. extract and install to a flash drive and also install my Minecraft package to the slax\modules folder. Basically all you need to do is boot the flash drive, then click on the link for minecraft in the start menu thingy. I also included a shortcut to the saves folder on the desktop, but you will need to run minecraft before you can use it. If minecraft doesn't work, you may need to find a driver for your video card for slax.

I take no responsibility for any damage that may occur when using this. If you do something stupid like change your C: drive's MBR... You're on your own...

Hmmm. Can you take out text editing and browsing the web? Those are unnecessary.

Unfortunately no, they are part of the basic slax package. Which is why I might look for a smaller linux distribution to try this with. But 300MB is pretty small to run minecraft on.

Ha! Tiny Core Linux!
12MB total!

It looks like 55MB for java... and then I'll probably need a driver... But it might be do-able. Minecraft in under 100MB?

Slax can be run in a persistent environment, and in fact does so by default. The mode you are using, which copies the root FS to RAM, is known as 'Always Fresh'. To run in persistent mode, I recommend writing the ISO to a flashdrive with UNetbootin. When you boot from flash drive using UNetbootin, it presents a boot menu at boot time. You should be able to just hit Enter and go to persistent mode.

Please post a download when you're done

But how will this work, the drivers, I mean? It seems if you used generic ones there might be performance issues, but obviously having a library of them within the flash drive isn't exactly feasible. So, will you just have to insert the drivers yourself? That might be a good solution for everyone.

Also, just a n00b question here, having Optifine pre-installed in the MC.jar would be pretty 1337.

This is awesome . Maybe my piece of crap school laptop can run minecraft now.




if im lucky that is
also your awesome if you found this

I could get your school laptop to run minecraft no matter how bad it is.

And I hate 1337.

It technically does run already. Just at a 0 fps according to the debugger.

ZeoNet wrote:

Slax can be run in a persistent environment, and in fact does so by default. The mode you are using, which copies the root FS to RAM, is known as 'Always Fresh'. To run in persistent mode, I recommend writing the ISO to a flashdrive with UNetbootin. When you boot from flash drive using UNetbootin, it presents a boot menu at boot time. You should be able to just hit Enter and go to persistent mode.

Hmm... I see. I think I knew that... Ha

I'm working with tiny core now though, since its... 12MB. So hopefully I can get it running!

12 mb?

I could run that on my shoe!

No kidding...

Holy crap this is amazing!


I have no idea how to do it though

theoretically couldn't you (well, a computer scientist) merge minecraft with linux? so basically minecraft is the only thing that is on there? Like it starts with your computer.

Yes, that is mostly what Danice is doing.

What is the current progress?

THEORETICALLY yes you could. All you need is linux to run java which then runs minecraft. The problem is that minecraft is a visual game. So you need a window manager and drivers and openGL and junk like that. I am working on a running a server off tiny core for a start, which would be only about 50MB total (linux is about 8, java is 48) But the client needs a little bit more. I almost have it, but i need nvidia drivers and they aren't playing nice with tiny core.

To run minecraft client:
tiny core - 8MB
FLTK/FLWM graphical desktop environment - 4MB
Xorg - ~30MB
Java 6 - 48MB
Drivers - ??? (probably around 20MB)

So total space is around 100MB. This is loaded into your RAM, so basically take your RAM - 100MB and thats how much RAM you have to play minecraft on. For me thats like 7.9 GB of ram

Very informative, Danice.