the corner office

Hey Colin,

I must have missed you were running Notes on Linux. Nice. I've tried it with a few different distros but always tried using IBM's "linux version" for which I couldn't get cpio to build on redhat, couldn't get domino to build on suse, and had no chance in hell of getting it to work on lindows. Never did get around to trying WINE though I've read enough to be interested in giving it a shot. Any notes you can share are greatly appreciated.

Cheers

Setting up is pretty straightforward these days - I got things working almost "out the box" with 6.5.1. My understanding is that IBM did a lot of work getting 6.5.x Wine-friendly so that IBMers could use it internally. Volker had a few pointers on his site a while back - and that's a good starting point.

I'm not doing a lot of hard-core work on Notes right now, but I'd say that Wine more or less does the job for end-user stuff. There are a few quirks which can make it a bit frustrating... key mappings getting confused and the occasional UI widget which doesn't behave as expected. Designer has more quirks, but I've been able to do development with it and it's passable. Script runs fine - even stuff like file I/O and whatnot. The debugger has some widget issues though. The one area that's still quite shaky is Java - don't expect any AWT/Swing stuff to work, and I occasionally ran into JVM memory issues.

I like it because I don't live in the Notes client like I used to, and it allows me to keep Linux as my primary desktop... the real value I think is if you need access to Notes while trying to make a go of living in a Linux world. But if I were spending 24/7 in Notes, I'd definitely move back to Windows.

If you need any help or pointers, drop me a mail and I'll be glad to help :)

(and of course, with Workplace/Linux plans, it seems like native Linux support for Notes isn't far off!)

Thanks Colin!

Sometime this year, maybe soon, I'm putting up a DHCP server at home with linux and while it wont need Notes, it will give me a reason to seriously consider moving ye old workstation to linux as well... and then I'll need it. Appreciate the comment re: living in notes 24/7. I do at work, but at home I think I can get away from that as java takes over my hobby interests.

Cheers!