Received a Lotus Award for Outstanding Customer Satisfaction in Northeast IOT

As IBM told us some days before Matthias Knäpper received an award for 2011 for his training activies during the last years. Many thanks to IBM and Lotus for the last decade offering trainings and projects together with us that makes outstanding customer satisfaction possible.

We hope to be able to offer a lot of trainings in the future to help customers to enhance their skills all around Lotus Software.

And here comes the award......

Lotus Notes installation on Ubuntu 11.10

Since version 11.04 it has been very complicated to install a Lotus Notes 8.5.x Client if you want to use more than 4 GB of ram. If you install a 64bit version of Ubuntu you have to install several patches from a couple of strange places to be able just to install the software.

This article has been deeply influenced by a Lotus Notes Wiki-article.

If you update to the current release 11.10 (Oneric Ocelot) it is highly recommended to use the 32-bit version of the operating system. After you successfully installed the release on your pc or latpop use the ubuntu software center to install a different kernel. Best choice is a so called PAE-Kernel, which means that you still run a 32-bit machine which aftwerwards will be able to use 36-bit of memory: 64Gb of Ram. This might be enough for your laptop ;-)

After installing the new kernel and rebooting your machine to use it first check whether you have the right kernel up and running by typing to a shell

uname -r

which results in something like this:

After that you have to install some ubuntu libraries to fullfill all dependencies of Lotus Notes. Do a

sudo apt-get install libgnomeprint2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnome2-0 libgnomeui-0

After that you can start to install Lotus Notes. Switch to the directory where the instalation files are located (eg a network device mounted at /media/install) and start the installation of Lotus Notes there by typing

sudo ./notes.de.sh

This will install the german version of Lotus Notes 8.5.3. After finishing the Installation start Lotus Notes the first time to configure it correctly.

After that you might want to install additional components of Notes:

sudo ./activities.de.sh
sudo ./cae.de.sh
sudo ./sametime.de.sh
sudo ./symphony.de.sh

This is just to install activity (IBM Connections) integration, the compsite application editor, Lotus Sametime client integrated in Notes and the integrated version of Lotus Symphony.

If you install Symphony don't forget to remove Libre Office which will be automatically installed during setup of Ubuntu (except you really want to use two different office packages on your pc).

That's it. If you recognize some negativ graphical effects you solve most of them by exchanging some so-libraries as recommended by Lotus Developerworks

wget http://www.benkevan.com/upload/lotus_notes/libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0
wget http://www.benkevan.com/upload/lotus_notes/libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0
wget http://www.benkevan.com/upload/lotus_notes/libgdk_pixbuf_xlib-2.0.so.0
wget http://www.benkevan.com/upload/lotus_notes/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
sudo mv *.so.0 /opt/ibm/lotus/notes

There are some smaller issues that could happen. One of it is the disability to view an attached file in Notes directly. To solve this just do the following:

sudo mv /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/openwith /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/openwith.bak
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gnome-open /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/openwith

After that, enjoy your Lotus Notes client on Ubuntu.

And it is using a lot of memory.

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Symphony Viewer for iOS Devices Pulished

Today 2011-12-12 IBM published a viewer for ODF-documents on iOS devices.

Description

With the IBM® Lotus® Symphony Viewer you can view Open Document Format (ODF) text documents, presentations, and spreadsheets downloaded to your phone or tablet without the need for any network connection. Launch the viewer directly from the application icon and choose an ODF file to view, or select Symphony when you want to view a document.

You can download and install this viewer for free from your iTunes acount or using this link: Symphony Viewer for iOS Devices Pulished

No backup with iPad/ iPhone possible?

Seit Monaten klagt eine wachsende Zahl von Benutzerinnen und Benutzern über einen hohe Prozessorlast beim Synchronisieren ihrer iPod, iPhone und iPad Geräte. Während des Backup-Prozesses kommt es zu einem Stillstand des eigentlichen Prozesses und die Sicherung kann auch nur über den Task-Manager abgebrochen werden. Außerdem berichten einige User über keine oder nur sehr eingeschränkte Möglichkeiten auf den iTunes-Store zuzugreifen (keine Formatierung im Store oder Store läßt sich gar nicht ansprechen), obwohl das Netzwerk funktioniert (Webseiten lassen sich normal abrufen) und auch die Firewall definitiv kein Hindernis darstellt.

Es scheint sich hier häufig um ein Problem des Windows winsock catalog zu sein. Um dies zu beheben kann man auf der Kommandozeile (Rechte Maustaste auf 'Start - Zubehör - Eingabeaufforderung' und 'Als Administrator ausführen' auswählen) folgendes eingeben:

netsh winsock reset

Nach einem Neustart von Windows sind die Probleme meist behoben und ein Backup/ Synchronisation mit iTunes ist danach möglich. Bitte hier auch die Hinweise von Microsoft zu dem Thema (link) beachten. Manche Programme mögen den reset halt nicht.