Lotus Notes

This articles gives you some keys to successfully install IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.2 on a Gentoo workstation.

Installing Lotus
Fetch the RPM package from the IBM website (if you have a Passport advantage, you’ll eventually find out the line you’ve been looking for for ages in it). Download the whole archive and extract : it’s the only one needed for an English installation of Lotus Notes client.

RPM on Gentoo: be ready to uninstall
As you know, Gentoo is not a RPM-based distrib. I guess you can achieve the same with .deb packages. The rule is to look at what the package contains so you’ll be able to properly remove it by yourself. Don’t hope for a, it will probably not work.

If you don’t have or :

This will create a .tar.gz archive that contains the files which would be deployed during a RPM installation. You can browse it for your knowledge. Add to these: and.

Lauching
Lotus Notes will refuse to run as root. It may also refuse to start at all, or show the splash screen and fork but remain invisible.

Missing libraries
This will show you which libraries are not found. In that case, you may need to emerge these. Just check they are not already present in the directory. If they are, no action is needed.

Launch it
You should launch it first from a console, so you can see the output.

Nothing shows up and no major error is reported
First, you must have to approve the licence. If your system is secured, you probably mount the partition with the  option. I found out that on first launch, Lotus creates a file in /tmp and executes it so you can approve the licence. To know if this is the case, check the output of this command:

If something is returned, you are using option, so:

And relaunch Lotus Notes as a user.

Still no luck
1./ The logfile you are looking for is. Look for "GRAVE" string.

2./ Install som needed libraries

3./ Setup LD_LIBRARY_PATH

4./ Error: WARNING CWPPR0030W: Feature com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.embeddedbrowser.feature_8.5.1.200610181506 is not installed on the platform

and put : on beggining of this lines

/opt/ibm/lotus/notes/framework/rcp/rcplauncher.properties

5./ Error: Cannot store document; database has too many unique field names Maybe you have some *.nsf in data direstory. Try to rename it first to something like *.nsf_old and discover which file *.nsf make the problem.

6./ Run notes from your normal account with this command:

7./ Lot of error lines on console when I running lotus notes, lotus is slow.

Recompile dbus with X support.

ebuild
This ebuild installs depended packages : app-office/lotus-meta-8.5.3