Monday, January 12, 2009

Installing Lotus Notes on a Mac, part 1

We only have a handful of Apple computers in the building and I am the go to person for all things Apple related. One of the hardest tasks I have found is installing Lotus Notes correctly for end users in OS X. Just last week IBM finally released Lotus Notes 8.5 for Mac out of beta but it is for Leopard only.

This is fine for all but one of my users who has a Mac Pro running Tiger. I have a Leopard license for him but because he is running Creative Suite 2.3 I can't upgrade him yet. Creative Suite 2.3 is not compatible with Leopard. Even at academic prices that means dropping an additional $330 for the Design Premium pack in order to get both Photoshop and InDesign. It's actually cheaper to buy more software than needed because the Photoshop license alone is almost $300.

We have a new employee, a web programmer for one of the departments, that has a brand new iMac running Leopard. Last week, before 8.5 was out of beta, I tried to install the Lotus Notes 7.02 client on his computer. I installed it while logged into his user account, which has administrative access, but had lots of file permission problems just trying to finish the setup process.

Apparently, even though it was installed as the user, the default permission settings do not allow him read/write access to his data folder. I had to go into the data folder, manually give him ownership and the propagate those settings to the enclosed items. Usually this takes care of the problem but now I am just getting a random "file permission error" that tells me nothing - no information about what file or what the problem is.

My next plan of action is to start over with the new 8.5 client and see if that fixes the problem. Since he is gone for the next three days at a training class I have time to trial and error things without interrupting his productivity. I will keep you all posted on how it goes.

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2 Comments:

Blogger Adriaan said...

This is exactly the problem I have with installing Lotes Notes Client 7.02 on Leopard. I already had problems in the version verification since it only wants to installon OS 8 and not higher. Anyway fixed those problems, but after installing ran into a lot of file permission issues which I fixed. Finally the random "file permission error" which does not refer to any file. It would be great if you can let post your solution. Did 8.5 fix the problem?

Adriaan

January 20, 2009 11:35 AM  
Blogger Angela said...

Yes - when I installed 8.5 I no longer got that file permission problem. I just did an install over the top of 7.02 and it worked.

I know there solution probably requires finding whatever folder or file Notes is trying to modify and change those permissions. Since 8.5 came out of beta that same day I gave up looking for whatever changes needed to be made.

January 20, 2009 11:38 AM  

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