ZX says:

…
In the end, this is great news for Eclipse which now gets to interact with a whole new set of users and developers.

Eclipse (OSGi) on clients… devices… servers… , what’s next?
…

OSGi is great on my desktop, laptop, servers, even mobile phones. But lotus notes based on OSGi ? I’m a die hard Eclipse fan and developer. But when it comes to usability of the software that I have to use everyday I’m a tough guy to convince.

For another potshot at this installer (for now) it is about 673 MB, is packaged as a .tar (Anyone at IBM lotus notes packaging team heard about something called as gzip/bzip2?) The documentation (which is about a total of 3MB) comes as a separate download. While it is a good idea to package the documentation separately I wonder if the installer comes with some documentation.

I just hope that I do not have to go through all these pains and musings and some more pains to install Lotus Notes 8. Especially after downloading something that is 673 MB.

Here’s another way to make Lotus Notes not work on Ubuntu.

Start up your print server.

Not amused ?

Raghu pointed out to the fact that lotus notes stopped working the day he got his printer installed. It was a surprise to me, but this happened today when I got a printer setup on my laptop.

Try stopping the cups print server, and the hplip services, and start lotus notes. That should get lotus notes running. Start the above services, and lotus notes would stop working!

Amazing, but true. It’s all software written by some brothers in the same trade as I am.

That said, this is in addition to a HOWTO on installing the Lotus Notes 7.0 Client on Ubuntu.

I’d rather that a very popular lotus notes fan tell you more on why lotus notes is a great tool! What I focus here is on some inside stuff that I figured while installing the lotus notes client on my laptop. Stuff that could have possibly been done in a far better way.

I did this merely as an “educational exercise” to understand if it would be possible to fool the installer into thinking that all is fine, so that it can go ahead installing lotus notes. To give you a brief about how the installer works:

The installer is a statically linked binary that extracts a jvm and an installer jar with some parameters, and then deletes the jvm and the jar on finishing. When the installer was running, I copied the jar to another location, extracted it, decompiled the classes inside. A quick grep on the error message, and I got to the java class where the installer “detects” the mozilla version (and fails).

Here are some things that the installer was doing in more or less the same order:
1. Check the existence of /etc/gre.conf or /etc/gre.d/gre.conf
2. Read the file, and check that there’s a line of the form [majorVersion.minorVersion.patchNumber]
3. Verify that majorVersion.minorVersion > 1.4
4. Find out where GRE_PATH for this particular version points (this is the directory where mozilla resides, in my case /usr/lib/mozilla)
5. Generate the following script:

#!/bin/sh
ldd "/usr/lib/mozilla/libgtkembedmoz.so" | grep gtk>&/tmp/iwcttmp.out #ldd prints shared library dependencies

6. Execute the script.
7. Read the file /tmp/iwcttmp.out.
8. Verify that it contains the string “libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0″ (WTH, one may say)
9. In case any of the above steps fail show the famous error message

Now here’s the glitch.
1. I’d got the right version of mozilla (1.7.13 which is > 1.4).
2. I had libmotif3 (as specified by a support page at IBM lotus notes).
3. I had got libgtk1.2 installed (as required by the installer)
4. I verified that libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0, really does exist (it did)

Having verified all the above, why did the script fail ?

I’ll tell you why
/bin/sh is linked to a minimalist shell called dash on Ubuntu. And the line ldd "/usr/lib/mozilla/libgtkembedmoz.so" | grep gtk>&/tmp/iwcttmp.out does not work with dash. Anyone heard about posix compliance ?

Now that is the reason why you need to uninstall dash, and install bash in order to get lotus notes 7.0 installed !

End of class.

I ran into the notoriously infamous “Could not validate mozilla version” message, that I’d seen a lot of times before. In case you also run into this problem. Here’s a howto to get you out:

Note: These steps are to be run as root

1. Install libmotif3:
sudo apt-get install libmotif3

2. Install gtk1.2:
sudo apt-get install libgtk1.2

3. Remove dash:
sudo apt-get remove dash

4. Create a location where you want to install Lotus Notes:
sudo mkdir -p "/opt/IBM/Workplace Managed Client/"

5. Make this directory writable by you:
sudo chown ketan.ketan "/opt/IBM/Workplace Managed Client/"

Note: None of these steps are to be performed as root

1. Extract the Lotus Notes package:
unzip /opt/downloads/C93D1NA.zip -d notes

2. Change into the directory where you just extracted notes:
cd notes

3. Extract the Lotus Notes installer:
unzip Personality.zip

4. Change some file permissions:
chmod 755 setuplinux.bin setup_wct_platform.bin

5. Copy the setup file to the correct location:
cp setuplinux.bin updateSite/features/com.ibm.workplace.notesinstall.linux.feature_7.0.1.0000-0900/bin/linux

6. Now we are all set up to install:
./setup_wct_platform.bin

That should be able to get you through the installer. Add a comment on this entry in case you are unable to get things done.

Update on 23rd March, 2007: Does lotus notes not work even after these instructions ?