Ubuntu Linux 11.04 Natty Narwhal and IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.X

Morning All   I upgraded from 10.10 to 11.04 on Tuesday 3rd May, but didn't get much opportunity to do anything significant with the machine ( 4061-BL5 Lenovo Thinkpad W500  ) until this weekend.   The first observation is that Lotus Notes 8.5.2 started to play up  post-upgrade. The client would start up normally, but I wasn't able to preview or open any emails, or access the Replication page. In all cases, the page/tab title would appear in the tab view along the top of the client, but the contents wouldn't appear.   When I first hit this problem, I applied the 8.5.2 fixpack (  lotus_notes852FP2_linuxUb.tar ) but to no avail.   The problem persisted through reboots, both cold and warm.

I then removed 8.5.2 and installed 8.5.3 CD4 ( notes853standard_linux_cd4_prod_deb.tar ), but saw exactly the same problem.   Thankfully, a quick bit of Googling later, and I'd found this: -

http://usablesoftware.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/lotus-notes-8-5-2-fp2-in-ubuntu-11-04-natty-narwhal-64bit-beta-1/   and followed one of the forum responses off to this bug on Launchpad: -

libgtk2 2.24.0 break Lotus Notes user interface

which directs one to download, compile and use patched "shared object wrapper"   I did need to install the libgtk2 header files: -   $ sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev   and also ensure that the downloaded Makefile was correctly formatted - I'd copied/pasted it from the site, and used vi to create it, meaning that I'd forgotten to add in the leading tabs: -   all:
[TAB]gcc -Wall -Wextra `pkg-config --cflags gtk+-2.0`-shared libnotesgtkfix.c -o libnotesgtkfix.so -ldl

clean:
[TAB]rm -f libnotesgtkfix.so

Having done this, I copied the newly created module (  libnotesgtkfix.so ) and the wrapper script ( notes-wrapper.sh ) to the /opt/ibm/lotus/notes directory, and then use the wrapper script to start Notes.   Job done.

The power of the community ...

Kudos to Soren Holm for writing this patch so quickly ...