tecosystems: A Lazy, Pre-Holiday weekend Post
Steven O’Grady at Redmonk asks:
Linux at the Tipping Point?:
“You remember how I said the Tipping Point for desktop Linux was not yet in sight? That’s probably still true, but I have to admit, when a near 20 year Mac user with a Mac tatoo decides to leave the platform I might need to rethink my timetable just slightly. And where are all the ex-Mac folks going to? Ubuntu, almost universally. Interestingly, they also seem to be choosing Lenovo’s Thinkpads in large numbers.
I’ve been running Ubuntu for a week now on an X41 Thinkpad and am very, very happy with the experience. As O’Grady also notes in his post, Ubuntu’s package management for apps is superb and makes the entire experience a friendly one. However, I can predict this machine I am running will fall silent the second I try to depend on it for corporate communications due to Lotus Notes lack of support and my technical lassitude in getting Notes to run within the
Wine emulator. That, and knowing the security parameters of the corporate network, this machine will not integrate well. I need to figure out how to integrate it into the home network so I can pull music off of a shared server drive. Ah, holiday weekend beckons and I have better things to do.
IBM is in fact working on a Java version of the Lotus Notes client
which runs on Linux. See http://www.eclipsecon.org/2006/Sub.do?id=461
So, what happened when you tried getting Notes running under Wine?
Maybe I should try it…
I’ve been too distracted by the holidays to dive into Wine and I need to wait until I get to Raleigh to figure out how to download the Notes client through our internal software installers.
I may need to beg my way onto on the “Hannover” beta list. Seems a much more elegant way to get Notes. This all begs the question of how a Ubuntu machine will make it through the IBM/Lenovo firewalls on the internal LANs.
I usually has suprisingly little trouble getting my PowerBook to work on corporate intranets. Everyone swore that it wouldn’t work and was probably against policy, but I’d just plug it in, and it’d suck down everything it needed from DHCP and friends. I even got it to work with Exchange after digging around for the right machine names and port numbers in Outlook’s properties/preferences menus.
I suspect the same will be true, if not truer, of Ubuntu/Linux.
The one spot I did have problems was the corporate VPN network. Instead of using “standard” VPN — which XP, OS X, and others OSs ship with — I encountered a Nortel network that required a client download. Of course, there was only a Windows a download. But, even that worked after I found a third-party VPN that worked with it from Apani. They have Linux clients as well, so if you hit a wall with VPN access, perhaps they’ll come in handy: http://www.apani.com/vpn-clients/overview
Of course, part of the advantage of using Ubuntu/Linux would be that someone had alreadt written up such a client for you.
Thanks. I totally forgot the VPN issue. I’d like to haul the Ubuntu-‘Pad to RTP with me next week, but since I am travelling to Germany first I may leave it behind in the interest of weight savings — that and two laptops tend to freak the TSA security folk out.
OK, tried running Lotus Notes 7 in Wine.
Didn’t work so well, so I organized a little bug hunt.
See http://wiki.winehq.org/LotusNotes
It seems to be working now with wine-0.9.18
if you copy Notes already installed;
if you want to run the Lotus Notes installer,
you either need to apply a patch or wait for wine-0.9.19.