I'm a bit concerned that the default LimeWire installation comingles program and user data in the same directory. That's just not The Right Way to Do Things on reasonably modern operating systems.

I'want to install LimeWire into /opt/LimeWire but keep user data in $HOME/LimeWire. I can't make this work.

Is there any way to indicate to LimeWire (environment
variable, command line switch, smoke signals) where the
limewire.props file is located?

Or, alternately, if I make LimeWire run with $HOME/LimeWire as the current dir (and it will then be able to locate the .props file), is there any way I can tell it that the class files and such sit over in the /opt tree.

I had the same concerns, so I decided to grab the Open Source version of LimeWire (http://www.limewire.org) and see what could be done. It turns out that in RunLime.java, the class that gets invoked to start up LimeWire, there is a line where it looks for the limewire.props in the current directory. This is why the runlime.sh script states that "This script must be executed in your LimeWire install directory".

So a simple fix was to create a new script under /usr/local/bin, or wherever you prefer. This script, assuming a jre or java executable is in your PATH, is simply:
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<pre>
#!/bin/sh -p
J2SE_PREEMPTCLOSE=1; export J2SE_PREEMPTCLOSE
LIME_HOME=/usr/local/LimeWire
CLASSPATH=
for f in $LIME_HOME/*.jar; do
if [ "_$CLASSPATH" = "_" ]; then
CLASSPATH=$f
else
CLASSPATH=${CLASSPATH}:$f
fi
done
export CLASSPATH
cd $HOME
java RunLime
</pre>
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This solution is very simple, and seems to work without any problems. It will probably not work for a user who does not have a limewire.props in their home directory, though. This could be fixed by making the script a little smarter, maybe copying a default limewire.props from /etc/skel if it does not exist.

A more elegant solution that I've implemented is a change to RunLime.java. I've modified RunLime.java to look for the limewire.props in the user's home directory, if such a directory exists. If the file does not exist, it creates it with some default values. This is a little tricky on Windows though, since there isn't always a user home directory. I'm still working out all the issues with this, and haven't even considered what to do on a Mac yet...

Thanks for posting. This looks very helpful.