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IBM Collaborative Software On Linux I'm blogging from Alan Bell's session here at the UK Admin & Development Conference. My own session is done, and I'll blog about it later. I had a tough choice for this timeslot, between Andrew Pollack, Rocky Oliver and Alan, but since there's no ocean separating me from Rocky and Andrew most of the time, I figure I can catch up with them more easily than I can catch up with Alan at other times. BTW: I'll be coming back to create links in this post later. I'm trying to type and listen to Alan at the same time, and looking up URL's can be left for later. Alan spoke about, and showed us Notes running on Linux. He gave us all a freebie Knoppix CD, too. Thanks, Alan! There was not a large audience in the room, and Alan had only a few slides and lots of demos, so it was a very informal atmosphere. An aside: what is the proper tense to use for live blogging from a conference session? Present, or past? I'm using past, because I presume that I'll be coming in to edit this post later -- even if only to put the links in. But it doesn't quite feel right! Alan was running Knoppix with KDE on VMWare on a ThinkPad. He assumed no background in Linux, so he's gave a bit of a guided tour of the KDE desktop. Then, he showed Notes 6,5,1 running on WINE, which I'd never actually seen running. He noted that you can't run the Notes installer on Linux, but a copied image of an installed Notes client for Windows will run with the appropriately updated version of WINE). Drive mapping was entirely taken care of by WINE. The logical C: drive was simply a folder (directory) in a Linux file system.
The first hang came attempting to attach a file. WINE can't do the file attachment dialog. IBM could work around this, but Alan pointed out that that's not the right approach. Any difference between the behavior on Windows and Linux is -- by definition -- a WINE bug. One of the others in the audience asked about designer and admin clients, and Alan told us that they also work. In fact, he showed us designer. The next thing Alan showed us was iNotes Web Access running in Firefox under Linux. It looks great, and can even go offline via DOLS. Very cool.
The next topic was IM. Sametime for Windows does not work (yet) under WINE. Sametime Java does work on Linux. There's also IBM Community Tools, and Meanwhile. I've never heard of Meanwhile. Alan said that it's a free and open source implementation of the Sametime protocols. More later... I've been saving as I go along, but I'm getting a battery warning message, so I'd better shut down.
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