Installing Lotus Notes 6.5 under Wine

My cruel employer requires me to use Lotus Notes, so I finally got around to trying Wine. The result is acceptable.

Update, 08/19/2006: Dan Kegel of the Wine development team informs me "As of wine-0.9.19, Lotus Notes should just work under Wine; you can even run the installer, no need to copy an installation from Windows." and recommends users consult the official Wine page for Notes at http://wiki.winehq.org/LotusNotes. He says this holds for Notes versions 6.0, 6.5 and 7. In my case, I don't have the current installer for the version my employer gives us, since we've done at least a couple of on-line updates, so I had to copy an existing file tree as described below. That method required two additional DLLs, which may not be needed if you start fresh with the installer.

If the installer approach isn't available to you, you can start with a working Lotus Notes 6.5 installation, either on a Windows box or under another Wine configuration. If your employer is cruel, too, then no doubt you, too, have a Windows box.

1. By hook or crook, install the latest Wine.
2. Run "wine notepad.exe" in order to create your $HOME/.wine folder. Exit Notepad.
3. From your existing Notes installation, copy

   C:\Program Files\lotus
   to
   $HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/

4. Test:
   wine "c:\program files\lotus\notes\nlnotes.exe"
5. In my case, it failed, complaining about missing DLLs. From an existing Windows, I copied MFC42u.DLL and MSVCP60.dll to $HOME/.wine/drive_c/windows/system/ and then it worked.
6. Define an alias in ~/.bashrc:
   alias notes='wine "c:\program files\lotus\notes\nlnotes.exe" > ~/tmp/winelog 2>&1'

I tested all the above under Kubuntu Dapper Drake.

One final note: this may not happen with newer Wine versions, but in the past it occasionally happened that Notes would hang (or refuse to start for no apparent reason). When this happens, run ps to find any stuck Notes or Wine processes and kill them, then restart Notes.

Not sure this needs saying, but you can continue to run your Windows version and any other instances of Notes since all the data is replicated to the Domino server and clients will sync automatically.

20 August 2006

Ted Ruegsegger