Fine Wine .. I am always reminded of Billy Joel’s song “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”
A bottle of white, a bottle of red
Perhaps a bottle of rose instead . . .
Linux and WINE
I have taken a giant leap in my ever on-going quest to rid myself of the necessity to use Windows for my daily work. Being mainly an administrator and architect when it comes to Domino I have been feeling the pain of being treated like a red-headed step child by IBM – all just because I am a Linux user. Discrimination, I say! Off with their heads! No taxation without representation! I guess you get the general sentiment.
Returning to the world of serious debate, today was a good day. I have to use a VMware image or a VirtualBox image to run Windows on my Ubuntu client to run the Notes Admin client. I use the Admin client allot and sometime I just need it for 1 minute … and I don’t want to have to run a VMWare session all the time just for that reason.
In steps the hero – Wine but I did have to fiddle a bit to get it done correctly, here the process for Ubuntu 10.04:
- Install either using Ubuntu Software Center or via the terminal using [sudo apt-get install wine1.2]
- Run the configuration interface via Application – Wine – Configure Wine I really set nothing here, but running it once sets the base configuration
- Run the WINDOWS install executable for Notes/Admin/Design client 8.5.2
This is where the issue happened. The installer went ALMOST all the way and then broke off. It did actually register the program so I have the links in the Wine program to start them but the installer could not populate the notes.ini – it was empty but for the first line. A Notes client cannot run that way so what I did was simple – I cheated:
- Copy content of existing notes.ini from my VMWare image
- Adjust the directory settings for the Notes executable and data folder
- Copy my Notes ID file
- Copy my names.nsf (was not created yet)
I then ran the client and it went through the Notes client setup procedure.
…. Drum roll ….
Now I have a fully working Admin client that i can use to connect to the Server. Oh, I forgot .. I also have a Developer client and another Notes client as well. I can now run TWO Notes clients at the same time without having to jump through hoops. And all of that on a Linux workstation … I can now almost forgive IBM for discriminating against us Linux Admins, because we are one step ahead of Mac users who also do not have a native Admin client either. though – I guess there has to be some Mac equivalent of Wine that can run the Windows client directly. Does anybody have information on that? I don’t have a Mac.
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