My openSUSE 12 Journal - 8: IBM Notes 9.0 public beta

I was going to install Lotus Notes 8.5.3 on openSUSE 12.2... but a good friend of mine (Lotus geek) informed me that the next great version IBM Notes 9.0 is ready as an open beta.  He challenged me to live life on the edge again and, I accepted!

Link to download IBM Notes/Domino 9.0 public beta
Link to the public beta forum.

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that IBM has dropped the Lotus brand and name this new major version IBM Notes 9.0 Social Edition.  This is a great statement of intent and direction for this product/solution.

Installation:

Pre-requisite:  You will need to uninstall previous versions of Lotus Notes (if any).  Note that installing both 8.5.x and 9.0b is not supported (officially).

After you have downloaded the tarball for Notes 9.0b, untar it.  You will notice a bunch of RPMs and a smartupgrade.sh script.  Run/execute the script as root.  Its really that simple.

[Update on 23 Jan 2013]:  If running smartupgrade.sh script did not work for you, don't fret.  In the same directory where all the ibm_* rpms reside.  Execute, as root, zypper in ibm_*.rpm and let zypper figure out all the dependencies for you.  All good. 

The Notes 9.0b icon can be found via Application Launcher -> Applications -> Office -> More Programs -> IBM Notes.  You can right-click and select Add to Favourites so that you don't have to navigate that much just to start it later.

Note that in your very first startup, it will launch a text console for you to accept the license... just in case you miss it and wonder why you are stuck at the splash screen and nothing happens.

My openSUSE 12 Journal - 3: Lotus Notes 8.5.3

Lotus Notes is what I use at work and the latest v8.5.3 works well on openSUSE 11.4.  Although it installed without a hitch on 12.1, things goes awry when I start using it.  Here are my observations and how I managed to get it working again.  :)

For starters, Lotus Notes 8.5.3 only managed to render about half of its interface.  For example, I could see my inbox but email preview pane is blank.  Integrated SameTime worked but workspaces and replication tabs were blank too.  I suspect it could be some incompatibility or confusion with the GTK libs and I was right...  Google is my friend and I discovered a brilliant soul who had the same challenge, created a bug report against openSUSE and even created a workaround/fix.

[Update on 27 Nov 2011]: Oops, it occurred to me that Lotus Notes 8.5.3 is actually 32-bit running on 64-bit openSUSE 12.1.  That means the RPM created by Stefan Lijewski should have worked.  I cannot recall why I came to the previous conclusion.  I have just tried the 32-bit RPM and it worked for me.  Therefore, I am correcting my entry below. 

Unfortunately for me, I could not use his nicely packaged RPM and online repository because I am using 64-bit openSUSE 12.1. 

The easy way is to use a 1-click install via Stefan Lijewski's online repository.

The easy but manual way is to download the RPM before you manually execute a zypper in lotus-notes-gnome3-1-1.1.i586.rpm

In both cases, you will need to verify that your Lotus Notes launch icon has been updated to use the new notes-wrapper script instead of the original notes script in /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/ directory.

Finally, the hard way (if you're so inclined to experience compiling your own code) is the original method I used below.

Below is how I got Lotus Notes 8.5.3 working on openSUSE 12.1 (64-bit).

1.  Download the workaround fix from https://github.com/sgh/lotus-notes_gtk2.23.3/downloads

2.  Un-tar the fix, tar zxvf sgh-lotus-notes_gtk2.23.3-2028e8e.tar.gz

3.  You will need to install additional packages before you can compile the fix.  As root, zypper in make gcc gtk2-devel glibc-devel-32bit gcc-32bit

4.  In the sgh-lotus-notes_gtk2.23.3-2028e8e subdirectory, compile the fix with make

5.  If make completed with success, you should have a new file libnotesgtkfix.so in the directory.  Copy it and notes-wrapper to installed Lotus Notes directory /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/.

6.  Last and final step, edit your Lotus Notes icons (kmenuedit if using KDE4) and change the default launch script to execute notes-wrapper instead.

That's it.  Lotus Notes 8.5.3 should function normally... and its all good for the last 3 days for me.

I hear this would not be a challenge with the newer Lotus Notes 8.5.4 (yet to be officially released).  We shall see when we get there.  :)