minecraft, libpango, and Debian testing (bullseye)

A recent minecraft and/or linux update screwed the pooch.

The Minecraft.deb file from minecraft.net referred to libpango, which doesn’t exist on Debian testing at the moment.    The correct library is libpangox.  The solution, referred to here, is to unpack Mojang’s deb, edit the control file, rebuild the deb and install it.

Here’s what worked for me:

remove the dead package

sudo apt --fix-broken install

or

sudo apt-get remove minecraft-launcher

installing the pango lib

sudo apt-get install libpangox-1.0-0

disassembling Minecraft.deb

#make a place to work
 mkdir minecraft-launcher

#unpack the .deb into the workdir
 dpkg-deb -R Minecraft.deb minecraft-launcher

#edit the control file
 vi minecraft-launcher/DEBIAN/control

#replace the existing pango entry with something like
 #"libpangox-1.0-0 (>= 0.0.2)"  #save, exit editor

reassembling the package

nice -19 dpkg-deb -b minecraft-launcher

installing the package

sudo dpkg --install ./minecraft-launcher.deb