Lotus Notes 8.5.2 + Ubuntu 10.10 = working, out of the box

Wow, they got it all right this time. Everything works without any tinkering – thanks IBM, you made my day. Seriously.

Disclaimer: On x86 that is.

Lotus Notes 8.5 / A gdk Window is being destroyed out of DestroyWindow / Ubuntu 10.4 /

Pretty much works out of the box using the .deb’s. Pretty much, because … well, it’s Notes after all.

If you are experiencing the dreaded “A gdk Window is being destroyed out of DestroyWindow” error when starting Notes in a Terminal (or your basic Mail/Calendar/whatever windows are simply not visible/not appearing), follow this bug report on launchpad.

Cliff Notes:

• Download the four GDK libraries from http://www.freetechie.com/upload/lotus_notes
• Throw them into /opt/ibm/lotus/notes
• …
• Profit!

Don’t forget to change Notes’ default fonts. They suck. Other than that, works beautifully in my environment.

Lotus Notes 8.5 install under Sabayon Linux 5.0

Interestingly painless…

• Download the .deb version of the Notes client from IBM
• tar xfv <downloaded_archive>
• unpack the Notes client and Sametime with ar x ibm_lotus_notes-8.5.i586.deb and ar x ibm_lotus_sametime-8.5.i586.deb into separate directories
• unpack data.tar.gz and control.tar.gz in both directories (tar xfvz <archive>)
• elevate your ego to higher levels (aka become root)
• move the files in opt from the respective Notes client and Sametime directories to /opt
• in the Notes client directory, open postinst. Around line 254 comment out some lines and add one  so it looks like this:


# If on a Debian system, check to see if we have previously written an
# upgrade marker. If so, then set the action to "upgrade". This is to
# handle the fact that even on an upgrade, a Debian postinst script action
# is "configure", which doesn't give us an ability to distinguish initial
# install and upgrade functions that we need to perform.
#if [ -e /etc/debian_version ]; then
# if [ -e /tmp/ibm_lotus_notes.upgrade ]; then
# DPKG_ACTION="upgrade"
# rm -f /tmp/ibm_lotus_notes.upgrade
# else
# DPKG_ACTION="$1"
# fi
#fi
# ADD THIS LINE
DPKG_ACTION="configure"


• execute postinst in both directories
• start Notes and *cough* enjoy *cough*

This of course only applies to the Gnome Edition of Sabayon. Your mileage may vary when using the KDE Edition – will probably have to install lots of Gnome packages and their dependencies.

Thank you IBM!

… for making Notes 8.5 Beta 1 available in .deb packages. Works beautifully (well, it’s still ye’olde sluggish Notes, but hey…), looks good, good font rendering, no ‘beta-related’ crashes so far. I love you for that. Srsly. No more using that broken crap installer.

… I still hate you for creating/buying Notes tho.

Installing Lotus Notes 8 on Kubuntu Hardy 8.04

Since I gave in and switched from Sidux to the new Kubuntu 8.04 – simply because Sidux just was too bleeding edge for my work rig, too many kernel switches and the new 2.6.25 totally borking my Cisco VPN Client – I had to install Lotus Notes 8.01 … Again. And it was horror again. So just for future reference I should write down what made it work.

Stuff you need to install/do on a stock Kubuntu:

# sudo apt-get install libstdc++5 libgnomecanvas2-0 \
  libgnomeprint2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-0 \
  libgnomevfs2-0 libgnome2-0 libgnomeui-0
# cp <notesinstalldatadirectory>/deploy/install.xml /root
# sudo mkdir -p /etc/lotus/notes
# sudo touch /etc/lotus/notes/notesrc

Launch Installer, install away. Should work. At least did the job for me.