Chris Linfoot | Let me rephrase

Saturday, 2. July 2005

Let me rephrase

As usual Volker is right. I am being a little silly on this Linux usability thing. I'm angry about something and don't know who to be angry with.

As I already mentioned, I have fallen in love with Ubuntu Linux. So has my 9 year old. I created a new partition on one of the HDDs on his computer and installed Ubuntu. He now uses it almost exclusively except when he needs to boot Windows to play those infernal games that all seem to want DirectX.

A 9 year old comfortably using Linux certainly speaks volumes about usability.

So what is getting my goat?

It is the availability of applications to run on Linux.

Yes, Volker, I counted the reboots on installing Ubuntu. One. It installed more quickly than Windows and when it was done there was a complete Office suite (Open Office) as well as a substantial line up of other applications ready and waiting to go (CD burning, media players and so on). Great. Just one problem. Where's Notes?

This is where the wheels come off for me. Having a complete line-up of native applications is all that is needed to make Linux viable in the enterprise as well as at home and still we have no Notes client.

Enter Wine. Here of course it is worth pausing to consider why Wine is needed at all. It is because there are apps on Windows that are needed on Linux and no native version of those apps. Imagine if we needed a Linux compatibility layer in Windows to run those essential Linux apps that weren't available on Windows. In an ideal world, Wine would not be needed.

It was in my attempt to make Notes run under Wine on Ubuntu that I temporarily lost my patience with the whole affair the other day.

WineHQ suggests adding Wine as a repository in the Synaptic package manager. Trouble is, adding repositories to Synaptic in Ubuntu (Hoary Hedgehog) does not work the way that is documented so I ended up having to hack the repository file manually with a text editor to make it work.
Having added the repository, I couldn't connect to it. The proxy server here is an authenticating proxy and the proxy settings in Synaptic have no place to store a username and password. Every attempt to connect caused a proxy authentication warning and failed. I eventually found an undocumented hack (store proxy server name as username:password@proxy instead of just proxy) and that worked. (This is another area where Linux beats Windows - I still can't get Windows update to work through the same authenticating proxy server).
Downloaded Wine and installed it. It worked. I could even start my Notes client and log into it. It would work for about 5 seconds before becoming totally unresponsive and beginning to consume 100% CPU. But the Wine version reported was not the latest which is said to run Notes well. Next challenge - get a later version of Wine.
Drew a blank with Synaptic to get the latest Wine, so downloaded source instead and tried to build it locally. Got loads of package dependency problems and gradually found and added almost all of the packages necessary to build Wine. But this is where I am currently stuck. I am still trying to make sense of the raft of unresolved dependencies and I still can't build a contemporary version of Wine. So no Notes client on Ubuntu and a lot of time wasted trying.

So. Who or what am I angry with? Not Linux. Not Ubuntu. Not Wine.

I guess it must be Lotus. After all these years of pleading (Lotus: We'll give you the same answer as we've given the other 10 people who've asked so far today - there's no call for a Linux client), we still have no native Linux Notes client although I seem to recall reading somewhere that there will be a Linux client for Hannover. Not before time. I will go on record here as saying that the main reason we have not deployed Linux on the desktop in our enterprise is the lack of a Notes client.

Of course there is also the users' addiction to Excel, Word and particularly Powerpoint which while ably substituted on Linux by Open Office do not behave identically (helpdesk: I can't seem to find that helpful paperclip).

I have a dream. A Microsoft free desktop across the enterprise. Someone tell me I'm wrong.

Category: Software
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Comments :

1. Nathan T. Freeman04/07/2005 12:07:15

"I seem to recall reading somewhere that there will be a Linux client for Hannover."

That was in the formal announcement from IBM and Ed's blog.

And Lotus' answer was never "there's no market for a Linux client." It's always been "there's no single Linux client platform with enough of a market to warrant the testing expense."

2. Jerry Carter06/07/2005 18:43:02

I know of two people with stable Notes on Wine installations. Julian Robichaux (nsftools.com) and Rocky Oliver (www.lotusgeek.com). I tried to get it running on Lindows and SuSE and both times ran into problems very similar to your own. I'm out of patience for it till '07.

3. Julian Robichaux07/07/2005 13:29:18
Homepage: http://www.nsftools.com

I think this is your bug:

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2660

Looks like the fix may have only been in the cvs since July 1st, so you've really got to have a current version to work around the bug (or have one of the 2004 versions).

And you're right about the pain of building from source. I've rarely had much luck doing that myself.

- Julian

4. Romano Soprano11/07/2005 09:12:55

What about running Domino server on Ubuntu? did you try it? Is it a good idea?

5. Chris Linfoot11/07/2005 09:43:17

I haven't tried it. Ubuntu is based on Debian, so if Debian is a supported platform then it should work.

6. Josef12/07/2005 23:27:59

Hello,

AFAIK Debian is not a supported platform, it might work, though. I think the supported platforms are just RH 8 and SLES 8 and 9.
Even if it works without a problem then the problem might be with any plugin app - we have hit that with TrendMicro AV. Although Domino supports SuSE 9 (well, not the Pro version, but anyway...), the TrendMicro is stuck at SLES 8. So even if I ran SLES 9 (which seems to supported by IBM) I would get no support from TM since FOR THEM it is UNSUPPORTED.
But if you want to experiment then Mandriva should be a better choice since it has evolved from RH and has less compatibilty issues than SUSE (a good example is a Dell RAID manager which had to be tweaked lot more on SUSE than on Mandrake/Mandriva).

7. Dan Kegel18/08/2006 06:12:27
Homepage: http://wiki.winehq.org/LotusNotes

Try it again with wine-0.9.19. It should just work.
See http://wiki.winehq.org/LotusNotes for details.

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