I am extremely amazed to report that I was able to get Notes 6.5.4 running fine - so far - under wine.I am not sure if there are other people experiencing success running it, but I was really surprised that it was possible.
All information below was tested ONLY under Debian 3.1. It might work under other distributions, but I haven’t tested myself.
First, download wine-20041019 source code and obey requirements to compile it.
I don’t recommend trying any other wine version. My experience told me that all other versions (specially newer ones) was resulting in complete failures.
For Debian users, install also a package named ‘msttcorefonts’, available from sf.net.
I also recommend grabbing winetools - collection of scripts to properly set up a wine environment having no windows in the same box.
Keep default settings defined by winetools, like running as win98 etc etc.
DON’T execute winecfg that cames with wine to set it up, it breaks drive mapping and you will need to start it over.
DON’T run wine as root.
So far, I was able to execute any regular task I tried to in Notes client: open mail, navigate in views/folders, repliate, read mail with attachments, open designer, open admin, you name it…
No crash, no problem, font fidelity fine.
Only issue I had is executing its installation pack. NO WAY TO GET IT WORK.
Solution for this is to get a installed version of Notes (with Designer/Admin or not) and copy all files and subdirs to a folder under wine “fake windows system”.
I am not sure if this topic constitute and off-topic post or not. So, I will keep it in a general description. If it iw ok to provide detailed information, I can keep on sharing my results here.
I am also available directly by email (afn@harvest.com.br) or thru MSN (contact thru email first…).