Running Lotus Notes 8 on Linux with newer xulrunner

carson — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 11:49:01 +0000

I recently got tired of running Lotus Notes under wine because I kept getting meeting invites that I couldn't accept. So I ventured out because I had heard that Notes now had a Linux client and sure enough it does. The install is huge but it went very smooth up until the point that I first launched to read my mail. At the point where it should have shown me the start screen I got an error dialog with the error "JVM terminated. Exit code=160" and a big stack trace.

(Click the image to see a larger version)

After digging around a little I found that the Eclipse framework/SWT expected an older version of xulrunner to be installed. The simple fix to get Notes running was to move the xulrunner libraries out of the way:

mv /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9/ /tmp/
mv /tmp/xulrunner-1.9/ /usr/lib/

Now when I started Notes I was able to get all the way in and see the following error on the start page:

(Click the image to see a larger version)

Now the key to getting Notes into a usable state is to close the "Getting Started" tab. If you don't do this you can never move xulrunner back into place. Once you have closed the tab exit out of Notes and then put the xulrunner libraries back where they belong.

Now you can start Notes without an issue, just make sure not to open anything that requires a web browser.

(Click the image to see a larger version)

After going through this someone pointed me towards the latest 8.5 beta 2 release of Lotus Notes for Linux and after installing that I can report that it actually has fixed the issue. So whenever 8.5 comes out this should be fixed until another incompatible version of xulrunner comes out.

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Running Lotus Notes 8 on Linux with newer xulrunner