Hi all,
   I'm having some trouble starting up the linux client without the launcher.  I'm trying to do this so I can use a username to join a server while minecraft.net is down.  The server allows joining without verification, but the problem is it will then only allow one person since everyone has the name Player.
   On the IRC someone attempted to modify a bat script into a bash script for me.
I ended up with:
java -Xmx268m -classpath ".;bin/*" -Djava.library.path="./bin/natives" net.minecraft.client.Minecraft "javagamer"

Which I ran from ~/.minecraft/ and it gave me:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: net/minecraft/client/Minecraft
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: net.minecraft.client.Minecraft
    at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:217)
    at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
    at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:205)
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:321)
    at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:294)
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:266)
Could not find the main class: net.minecraft.client.Minecraft. Program will exit.

I fiddled with classpath a whole lot and couldn't get anything to work, yet it looks like I'm probably missing something very simple.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.