Installing the Groupwise Client on Ubuntu Hardy Heron

So we use GroupWise obviously. However for the most part, I spend my time on Ubuntu these days as I like XFCE4 and Ubuntu as a whole. This is not to say I don’t use my Novell Suse Enterprise Desktop, I do, quite a lot, but its also nice to have a bit of a play with other distros from time to time.

Now, Evolution is a great mail client, and it has connectors to GroupWise too, however, for me I don’t like the big clunky icons and the overall general responsiveness of the app. I do however like the GroupWise client (Although let it not be said, it has lots of problems).

Now, be warned, Novell, do not support the GroupWise client on Ubuntu, however it should be possible to get it to work. So here is a quick stab at it.

1. Download the Novell GroupWise Client for Linux from www.novell.com
2. Extract the archieve
3. You will see two RPM’s. We will need to convert them
4. Open a terminal in ubuntu and enter in sudo apt-get install alien
5. Now to convert the GroupWise rpm to a deb package, simply enter sudo alien –scripts novell-groupwiseclient.xxx.rpm (Where xxx are the version numbers)
6. Do the same for the other rpm, the GroupWise check app
7. Now, you have the packages converted, install them with sudo dpkg -i *.deb
8. The GroupWise client is then installed into /opt/novell/groupwise.
9. You should see the GroupWise client icon now on your desktop, double click to start it and hey presto you are done.

If you get a chance, do check out the Novell product line, especially the Linux stuff, some of the stuff, that runs on Linux is mad cool (IMHO).

Update: You may need to not use the JRE that comes with the packages. To use the open-java6 one complete the following;

1. sudo mv /opt/novell/groupwise/client/jre /opt/novell/groupwise/client/jre.old
2. sudo ln -s  /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/ /opt/novell/groupwise/client/jre