It's been a while that i've installed the Lotus Notes client for Linux on my laptop ... but because i've reinstalled my laptop from CentOS 4.4 to CentOS 5 , i needed to setup this crappy client once again ... 'crappy client ?' yes . First of all, IBM decided to release such tool only with its own installer (that is java based of course) ... so no RPM available (hmmm, that should have been too easy for stupid end users i guess ...) . The problem with such installer is that it doesn't even verify if you have dependencies ... it only installs a java-based workplace client (by default in /opt) but if you do it as root, it will try to setup the Notes plugin for the root account only ... (hehehe the Lotus notes client for Linux is not multi-users aware yet ...) . So recommandation is to create a /opt/IBM directory and let the user modify this directory ... You launch so the installation as a simple user but when it finishes you think you can now configure the client .... no !

Because no dependencies were checked you have to use ldd and strace to find what it is missing .. (in my case , using ldd notes and ldd lnotes under my \~/notes directory helped me find what it needs and openmotif22 was the one i missed ...)

But the story continues : the java installer modifies your \~/.bash_profile with stupid things like modifying your \$PATH by entering their software path in front of your existing \$PATH ! so you end with a java vm in your path that is not the one you've configured the proper way with /usr/sbin/alternatives !

I cleaned all this stuff and i ended by creating a (very) small script that uses a modified PATH only for Notes Client and LD_LIBRARY_PATH (oh, yes i forgot to mention that .so files were in \~/notes ...).

Here it is :

#!/bin/bash

PATH=\$HOME/notes/jvm/bin:\$HOME/notes:\$PATH

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=\$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:\$HOME/notes/:\$HOME/notes/jvm/bin/classic/ /opt/IBM/Workplace\ Managed\ Client/rcp/richclient -personality com.ibm.workplace.noteswc.standalone.linux.personality

PS : the LD_LIBRARY_PATH up to .personality is one line !

Conclusion : stupid but it was easier to run the win32 client with wine on Linux than a native client ! and IBM tries to push Linux, ? ouch !