techblog 

My first impressions of Notes on Linux are not good. I have been trying out Notes on SuSe 10.0 since its release.

All of the important content panes appear hidden by default (at least under KDE, it seems they are visible under Gnome) which took me quite a while to work out. The answer is to position the mouse near the right hand side of the main Notes window — the pointer will change to a vertical bar with arrows either side, allowing you to pull the hidden window’s edge and expose the content.

I am unable to open attached files. Using the Open or Open With… menus results in a silent failure of Notes to perform either of those actions. On a related subject, that context menu doesn’t work properly as a menu either — the items disappear and reappear as you move the mouse over them.

Lastly, and perhaps worst of all, I discovered today that the JVM I thought I was using — the one that I had taken care to make sure was available on my command line — is no longer the version it was. It seems that during the installation of the Notes client, Lotus saw fit to alter my .profile - changing my PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH and CLASSPATH variables inserting its requirements at the beginning of those variables — as it is clearly the most important application on my machine. So, after I found that a tool wouldn’t work (as I was suddenly using Notes’ Java 1.4.2 instead of my JDK 1.5) I commented out the junk in my .profile only to find that my environment still was not as I had previously left it. Well, it turns out that the Notes installer hadn’t missed a trick and took the liberty of creating a brand new .bash_profile in my home directory. Lovely.

My work around for this was to first delete the new .bash_profile file, then to cut the Installshield block from my .profile and put this in a new file: $HOME/bin/lotus_notes. I then added the command line beginning /opt/IBM/Workplace that can be found in the startup shortcut found on your desktop. The application can now be started simply by typing lotus_notes on the command line, or by changing the startup shortcut’s command line to be /home/<user>/bin/lotus_notes.

This is the final lotus_notes file:

#!/bin/bash  # var 1 : CLASSPATH="/home/matt/notes":`echo $CLASSPATH` if [ -z "`echo $CLASSPATH`" ] then CLASSPATH="/home/matt/notes" else CLASSPATH="/home/matt/notes":`echo $CLASSPATH` fi export CLASSPATH  # var 1 : PATH="/home/matt/notes/jvm/bin":"/home/matt/notes":`echo $PATH` if [ -z "`echo $PATH`" ] then PATH="/home/matt/notes/jvm/bin":"/home/matt/notes" else PATH="/home/matt/notes/jvm/bin":"/home/matt/notes":`echo $PATH` fi export PATH  # var 0 NOTESDATA="/home/matt/notes/data" NOTESDATA="/home/matt/notes/data" export NOTESDATA  # var 0 NOTESBIN="/home/matt/notes" NOTESBIN="/home/matt/notes" export NOTESBIN  # var 1 : LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/home/matt/notes/jvm/bin/classic":"/home/matt/notes/jvm/bin":"/home/matt/notes":`echo $LD_LIBRARY_PATH` if [ -z "`echo $LD_LIBRARY_PATH`" ] then LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/home/matt/notes/jvm/bin/classic":"/home/matt/notes/jvm/bin":"/home/matt/notes" else LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/home/matt/notes/jvm/bin/classic":"/home/matt/notes/jvm/bin":"/home/matt/notes":`echo $LD_LIBRARY_PATH` fi export LD_LIBRARY_PATH  # Command line to run notes... /opt/IBM/Workplace Managed Client/rcp/richclient -personality com.ibm.workplace.noteswc.standalone.linux.personality

I don’t think I’ll be using Notes on Linux for a little while yet.