I have been trying for a while to get Lotus Notes working under Linux, and decided to write this HOWTO, for anyone out there who has been experiencing this problem, and wanted to get rid of Windows.

I was only using Windows at work because of Lotus Notes. Now, I have no need to use it

What is required

First, you need to have a copy of Lotus Notes installed within Windows. Of course, you probably have this already, so nothing major. The reason why is because the installation routine for Lotus Notes Client does not work under wine. Trust me, I have tried

Second, you will need wine installing under Linux. For my installation, I have wine-20050725-6mdk.i586.rpm installed, as I am using Linux Mandriva 2006 Free.

Third, you will need to copy your Windows fonts over to your Linux installation. This is purely cosmetic, and to make the wine apps look good. Lotus Notes looks a bit weird otherwise. Check it after running, you'll see what I mean!

~/ is equal to your home directory, in my case, /home/ian. So where you see ~/, you can substitute with your home directory location.

Installation Process

First, install wine. This can be done using:



if it asks for dependencies, then make sure you say yes and let them install.

Next, you will need to copy the Lotus Notes installation from Windows to Linux. This can vary from one installation to the next. I believe the default under Windows is c:\lotus\notes. My installation is c:\program files\lotus\notes. This is because I liked to keep things in one location "Program Files" rather than installed apps all over the place. When you copy this to your ~/.wine directory, make sure it resides in EXACTLY the same place as it did in Windows. For example, I've first listed the location based on c:\lotus\notes, and second for my installation:



this is important. Make sure your notes.ini exists in the notes directory. Sometimes it can be found in c:\windows, but for wine it has to be in the notes directory where nlnotes.exe exists.

Next, copy mfc42.dll and msvcp60.dll to your windows/system directory under wine. These can be found under c:\windows\system32 on XP based systems. Substitute windows with winnt if you are using Windows 2000.

To complete the setup, place yourself in your notes directory, whether it is ~/.wine/drive_c/lotus/notes or ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/lotus/notes and run the following command:



this is to reset the files so that they are not read-only. It's best probably to do this anyway as a matter of course just to make sure.

Have a look at the notes.ini file and make sure the following sections do not exist:



That is the installation of Lotus Notes complete. You can now create a shortcut on the desktop pointing to your installation. Two examples are:



If you want icons, then check out these resources:

http://www.codestore.net/store.nsf/unid/BL...06?OpenDocument
http://www.nsftools.com/misc/NotesIcon1.png

I personally, prefer the second one

Lotus Notes will now launch and work correctly. Although the fonts will look a bit weird. I suggest changing these following the notes below.

Installing Windows TTF Fonts

Take a look at /etc/X11/fs/config, and you will see a line:



this is where the system is configured to look for TTF fonts, therefore, we can copy the Windows fonts over:



You have now installed the fonts, and when you run Lotus Notes, you'll see it looks a lot nicer.

Hope this proves helpful for anyone out there who wants to use Lotus Notes under Linux!

The procedure's a lot easier as of Wine-0.9.19,
all you have to do now is run the Lotus Notes
installer! See
http://wiki.winehq.org/LotusNotes
for more info.

Ah nice, I might have to try this. I've had to use Mandriva for Lotus Notes, since no other distro's wine works with it. Bizarre. But I love Mandriva anyway, so it doesn't matter

Let's hope it's integrated in Mandriva 2007.

EDIT:

This has now been added to my website

Installing Lotus Notes 6.5.x on Linux