Yesterday I received an e-mail from Bernd Hort who is helping be beta-test LotusScript.doc. Bernd Horts company is running Domino 6.5.1 on Linux. He is having problems with national characters not being generated correctly when generated using the background agent on Linux so to test I had to install a Domino on Linux system. The documentation is correctly generated through the German Notes client.
I normally use VMWare 4.5 to test different operating systems and to test applications I normally wouldn’t “infect” my production laptop with, so I fired VMWare up and tried to install Domino 6.5.1 under Fedora Core 3. The install went perfectly but I was unable to start Domino due to issues with libnotes.so so I thought I would turn to a supported Linux distribution and settled on SLES9 since I have some experience with it.
After downloading the ISO images (a VERY nice feature of VMWare is that it allows you to connect an ISO image to the virtual machine so the guest operating system sees it as the normal CD-ROM drive) of the Novell homepage I stopped dead in the tracks. X11 was unable to start during the installation – this I could live with… What I couldn’t live with was that the installation screen was split into 4 smaller screens after an otherwise promising start.
The solution was of cause found on Novells webpage via Google . The solution is to change the framebuffer at boot time by adding the boot parameter “x11i=fbdev”. After doing this the installation is ticking away… Nice.
The last SLES9 distribution I used was SLES7 and I must say that it has come a long way since then… It is quite clear that it has become much more business-like and the earlier green SuSE layout has been changed to a very sleek-looking blue layout.
The framebuffer is automatically set correctly on successive boots.
After all this is done I can continue to install Domino and actually try to reproduce the codepage error.