Posts tagged Linux

IBM support for Ubuntu

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James Governor of RedMonk raised a question that has come up a few times in the Lotus blogsphere, on the subject of Ubuntu as an IBM supported OS.

I mentioned the fact that DB2 is supported on Ubuntu, a fact which doesn’t really fit with some of the justification for not supporting Lotus Notes and Domino, that Ubuntu is not an “enterprise” operating system.

James followed up this morning, and wonders whether

Ubuntu really just isn’t seeing much in the way of enterprise adoption as yet

Sounds like a chicken and egg situation to me!

Ubuntu is an extremely popular desktop distribution, so in my opinion, chances are support for software like Lotus Notes on Ubuntu would go a long way to opening the door to further enterprise adoption. I realise this is not an adequate cost justification, but if we’ve managed to get the Notes 8 Beta running on Ubuntu by ourselves, my guess is there isn’t a hell of a lot that IBM would need to do to get this sorted.

One other point I have mentioned before (can’t remember where!) is that with Ubuntu support, could IBM Lotus not look to provide more of an “appliance” (along the lines of Nitix), if not for production, at least for testing or demonstration purposes?

With a consistent support for Ubuntu across the IBM portfolio, they could potentially provide a serious offering to the SMB market. Taking the appliance approach and therefore “hiding” the underlying technologies somewhat, certain barriers to entry could be eliminated, at least from an install / admin standpoint.

Good luck trying to get more on this one James, there are lots of us very interested in where it could lead!

So where is Microsoft at with Vista?

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This rather (in my opinion) poor piece of journalism from the BBC quoting Gates on Vista sales figures caught my interest, particularly following the news this week regarding Microsoft’s threat to persue patent royalties from open source initiatives such as Linux and OpenOffice.org. (Link via Bub Sutor).

Mr Gates said sales had been quicker than Microsoft expected, and made Vista the firm’s quickest selling software.

What!? Does anyone believe this stuff? What upset me about the article from the beeb was the lack of comment or verification of Gates’ statement. There is plenty on this out there, so you can do your own searches on google, but with Vista sales being reported as slow, Dell offering linux and bringing back Windows XP, how can it be Microsoft’s quickest selling software?

Oh, and to say sales were quicker than they had expected, that just makes me wonder just how low their expectations really were! ;-)

Just where are MS going? They are appearing increasingly deperate and looking to create confusion. Smells like fear to me.

My take on all this, forget Vista and move to Ubuntu. :-D

A few other Lotus + Ubuntu bloggers

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Over the last few days, I have noticed a few other bloggers from the Lotus blogging community mentioning Ubuntu.

Ferdy Christant has published a good article on his recent move to ubuntu on his new laptop.

Stuart McIntyre has a post on his attempt at getting the Notes 8 Beta running on ubuntu.

I look forward to following them both, I hope they are having as much fun as I am!

Are there any others out there?

A bug squashed

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As it turns out, my Ubuntu bug turns out not to be, following a response with some instrustions.

It looks like the nvidia-glx and nvidia-kernel-1.0.9629 was installed from a 3rd party source that is not compatible with the ubuntu version numbering schema.

You can try to remove the nvidia-glx and nvidia-kernel-1.0.9629 packages and install the ones from ubuntu instead. But be careful you may end up on a shell without X.

Unfortunately I wasn’t careful enough, and I ended up with no UI having broken my video driver install! Help!

Not being too experienced with all this, a late night ensued. Having googled various error messages, tonight I managed to recover, reinstall the correct nvidia-glx package, and also clean out a few unnecessary ones.

So, back to business, and to be honest, I’m happy it wasn’t really a bug, Ubuntu rules! :-D

Lotus Notes 8 Beta 2 on Ubuntu

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So, tonight I managed to have another go at getting the Lotus Notes 8 client running under Ubuntu.

Disclaimer: I do realise this is not supported, and I agree with John and his rules of engagement, curiosity has just got the better of me!

Thanks to Nathan’s tip on the Beta forum, I manually created a notes.ini file which was missing from the install, and managed to launch the client! :-D

Unfortunately it didn’t take me long to encounter NSD running :-( but I realise I’m on my own with this, though my guess is there’ll be a few others than just Stuart and I!

I’ve been taking a load of screenshots throughout the process, and will try to get full write-up of my adventures so far. Stay tuned!

Back in Windows-land, I have had a quick play with the client too, and to answer Bruce‘s question, I like, a lot! On first impressions, I think I’d go as far as to say that having to go back to the Notes 7 client now is going to be as enjoyable as working in Notes 4.6 was, prior to Saturday! Again, more detail to come.

On another note, Christopher Byrne made a good point in a comment over on Ed’s blog regarding a common tag for all this. I’m with him on using “Notes8Beta” for technorati.

Add a feed to Liferea from Firefox

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Being a linux newbie, I haven’t had much luck finding how to configure Firefox to use an external RSS client. Here’s how:

You can go under Edit->Preferences and choose the Tab Feeds.
There you choose Subscribe to the feed using and click on the button Choose Application and choose /usr/bin/liferea-add-feed

Thanks to Ralph‘s instructions, I now have Liferea connected from Firefox on Ubuntu.

My first ubuntu bug report

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I have had a problem for a while with the update-manager.

I finally got round to entering my bug report, so I am now the proud owner of an ubuntu bug!

https://launchpad.net/bugs/84961

Just have to wait and see whether its me that has broken something or an actual bug.

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