Lotus Notes 8.5 Installation

This is a place-holder section. In the mean time, the best installation/configuration/removal instructions is through IBM's Notes Client Installation and Upgrade document. It provides instructions for all the OS's IBM supports for Notes. Evaluation downloads including all supported platforms are available here: Evaluate: Lotus Notes and Domino Administrator clients. Note that the Administration Client and Domino Designer client are only available for Windows. The client, Lotus Notes, and the server, Lotus Domino, are available. Note that while the client is supported for Ubuntu, the server installation requires a little googling/tweaking to succeed. So Linux users can use the Domino server and Notes clients for mail and applications, but server administration and application design needs to be done using Windows. Note that a lot of server administration can be done using a web administration interface included with the Domino server. Please see the Administration help included for more information.

The basic steps are as follows:

  • Get the 8.5.x release package. It comes in either RPM or DEB formats. Once you have the tarball, (usually something like lotus_notes851_linux.tar), extract it into a new folder: 
     mkdir lotus_notes
 mv lotus_notes851_linux.tar lotus_notes
 cd lotus_notes
 tar -xf lotus_notes851_linux.tar
  • You'll now have a set of RPM or DEB files. If you've got DEB files, you're set. Continue to the next step. If all you have are RPM files, you'll have to convert them to DEB using alien: 
     sudo alien *.rpm

  • If you're doing a fresh install, just run the installation: 

     sudo dpkg --install ibm-lotus-notes_8.5.1.deb
 # Optionally, install Sametime, Activities, etc.
 sudo dpkg --install ibm-lotus-sametime_8.5.1.deb
 sudo dpkg --install ibm-lotus-activities_8.5.1.deb
 ...

  • If you're upgrading from 8.0.1, you can probably still perform the fresh install steps above, but there's a caveat! It seems that if you had Sametime installed in 8.0.1 and you run the install you'll have an endless number of "ActivityMonitor" or "ScheduleAutoLogin" messages. This has something to do with how Instant Messaging is configured in Sametime. There's an acknowledged issue, and comments about this. The better solution is to just go for a fresh install, by renaming your 8.0.1 install folder and doing a fresh install: 

     sudo mv /opt/ibm /opt/ibm.bak # Change this folder to your settings
 sudo dpkg --install ibm-lotus-notes_8.5.1.deb
 ...
    This is, of course, assuming that you're initial install was to the /opt/ibm folder.

That's it - you'll now have 8.5.1 installed.

Lotus Notes 8.0.1 on Jaunty Jackalope

This section defines the installation steps for Lotus Notes 8.0.1 on Jaunty Jackalope (9.04).

Pre-Requisites

Notes 8 for Linux requires the following:

  • libstdc++ version 5 
    •  sudo apt-get install libstdc++5
  • Eclipse. It's probably not absolutely necessary, but the notes client is built on Eclipse and your life will probably be a bit easier if you have it. 
    •  sudo apt-get install eclipse

Graphical Installation Steps

  • Create a new folder that you can work from 
    •  mkdir ~/Desktop/notesclient
 cd ~/Desktop/notesclient
  • Download Lotus Notes for Linux into this folder. This is usually available from your Notes administrator, or as part of the Notes/Domino package. The file's called C19U2EN.tar.
  • Untar the file: 
    •  tar -xvf C19U2EN.tar
  • Run the installer as sudo'er: 
    •  sudo ./setup.sh

  • This should launch the graphical InstallShield wizard. You'll be asked to accept the license and specify an installation folder (/opt/ibm/lotus/notes). You can accept these defaults if you wish, or change them to your preference.

  • The java-based installer has some screen issues on my machine. You have to click the mouse for about a second on the Next/Back navigation buttons in order for the action to be correctly detected. Screen refresh also seems very poor, so you may have to move the window about a bit for some of the screen to become visible. But YMMV.
  • You'll finally got to the summary selections and install window, at which point you click Install.

  • After installation is completed Notes should appear in Application -> Office -> Lotus Notes 8. But when you try to launch it as a regular user, you'll end up with a "Permission Denied" error!

  • Change ownership of the lotus folder in your home folder: 
    •  sudo chown -R me:me ~/lotus
  • Change ownership of the notes install folder. Note that this may cause problems if you're trying to use notes for multiple users on the same host. Let's assume you're not going to do that! 
    •  sudo chown -R me:me /opt/ibm
  • Change ownership of the configuration folders - /etc/lotus: 
    •  sudo chown -R me:me /etc/lotus
      This is necessary to allow your id file and individual configurations to be saved properly, and the initial error if you don't do this will be related to the pernames.ntf file (/etc/lotus/notes/data/shared/pernames.ntf).

  • You should now be able to launch Notes (Application -> Office -> Lotus Notes 8), but you'll end up with another error: 

    • IBM Lotus Notes does not have a production license. A temporary evaluation license has been enrolled for you to use for 60 days.
    • Continue for now. We'll fix this in a later step
  • You'll be asked for your id file to launch notes. This should have been provided by your network administrator, and is probably on a shared drive somewhere. Navigate to this location and select the file.
  • Notes should now launch.

Console Installation Steps

  • ./setup.sh -console

  • InstallShield wizard will install Lotus Notes 8.0.1 on your computer. Select 1 to continue.

  • Accept license
  • Accept default install directory (/opt/IBM/Lotus/Notes)

Uninstalling

Removed Notes takes the following steps:

  • Go to the install folder. By default this is /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/_uninst/
  • Run uninstaller.bin. Uninstallation may take quite a while, so be patient!

Troubleshooting and SNAFU's

=== During Installation ===

  • "The installer is unable to run in graphical mode. Try running the installer with the -console or -silent flag."
    • Caused by absence of libstdc++5. See the pre-requisites section above. You MUST have libstdc++5 for the installer to run.

Post-installation (when running Notes)

Trying to run Notes as a regular user results in "Could not launch 'Lotus Notes 8'. Failed to execute child process ...". This is thanks to the fact that we Notes was installed as sudo (which is the only way you *can* install). Here are some things to try out to fix this problem.

  • Your home directory should have a lotus folder (~/lotus) which is owned by root. Change this and the notes install folder to be owned by you: 

sudo chown -R me:me ~/lotus /opt/ibm

Thanks to:

References, Links, Resources

IBM Documentation on Lotus Notes installations

Instructions in the links below are for Notes 8.5, but are useful when dealing with Notes 8 as well.

Lotus Notes 6.5.2 on Breezy Badger using Wine

This section documents the procedure to install Lotus Notes Client (version 6.5.2) on Breezy Badger (this may work on earlier releases but has not been tested).

If you find any errors/changes to this document please feel free to write to <KetanPadegaonkar [at] gmail [dot] com>

Requirements

You will need to add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list 

deb http://wine.sourceforge.net/apt/ binary/

Installation

Installing wine

To install wine you'll need to perform the following: 

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install wine

Installing Lotus Notes Client in ubuntu

  • Install Lotus Notes Client 6.5.2 under Windows. Unfortunately wine still does not have support for windows installers. Make sure that you install this on a partition that is writable under ubuntu (a vfat partition is preferable)
  • Execute wine once, without any command line arguments as 

$ wine

This would setup wine and place the correct configuration files.

  • Create symlinks to windows partitions for use with wine. 

$ mkdir /.wine/dosdevices
$ cd /.wine/dosdevices
$ ln -s /path/to/windows/d d:
$ ln -s /path/to/windows/e e:
$ ln -s /path/to/windows/f f:
$ ln -s ~ h:                           # home directory is availble in h:
...
...
...
$ ln -s / z:                           # root partition is availble in z:
  • Almost done! Now use the following command to run Lotus Notes Client 6.5.2. Note the use of double slashes. 

wine f:\\Program\ Files\\notes\\nlnotes.exe =f:\\Program\ Files\\Notes\\Data\\notes.ini

I've created a shell script ~/bin/lotus-client that executes this long command for me.

Use an editor like gedit to create a file lotus-notes as: 

$ mkdir ~/bin
$ gedit ~/bin/lotus-client       # add the above command to this file
$ chmod 755 ~/bin/lotus-client

LotusNotes (last edited 2010-12-16 16:12:32 by 46-223-112-80)