The Notes R5 client runs under Wine with no significant reported problems. Andrew Woods, an internal Technical Architect with my parent company, Unipart Group in Oxford, England, has explored Notes 4.6 and R5 on Wine quite extensively and reported, "Basically, Notes works fine under Wine. It is easy to set up and install, and there is very little configuration needed. I am running Notes 5.0 under a (commercial) version of Wine called CrossoverOffice. This version of Wine also gives me support for Visio and some other Microsoft programs. Wine is a little tricky to set up printers. It is not too bad for local printers, but I have found difficulties in printing to shared NT printers from Wine. It's absolutely fine printing to them from Linux, so it's a Wine set-up issue."

When I asked about printing from Notes, Andrew continued, "I very rarely want to print from Notes. If I do, then I am quite capable of exporting or copying/pasting. This might be a stopper for non-technical users, though." And I'd agree with that point. Andrew also pointed out, "The other thing that may be a problem with Notes under Wine is Cadenza (at http://www.commontime.com) and other PDA-synchronization tools. The synchronization for my Zaurus (at http://www.notessync.com) can't see the PDA, but I haven't tried very hard yet!"

Lotus thinks that Wine has its place, too. In Domino for Linux Technical resources, at http://www.lotus.com/developers/itcentralnew.nsf/allpublic/2D96D32F0ED19D26852569DD0067B3D0?opendocument they give detailed instructions for setting up the Notes R5 client to run in Wine. There's another set of hints at http://www.developer.ibm.com/tech/faq/individual/0,,2:25424,00.html. So, not withstanding the stance discussed in point two above, Lotus recognizes that there's some market need to run the Notes client on a Linux machine. So they are, in some small way, hedging their bets. Reportedly Notes 6 also runs under Wine, if you can get it installed. The installer won't run, so you have to copy a working Windows installation to Linux and hope.

How good are these arguments?
Well I can't argue with the first point. A port of the UI pieces of Linux will be hard. Only Lotus knows exactly how hard, because only Lotus knows the Notes source code. And they have done the NOS (Notes Object Services) port already, so I think we can defer to them on just how hard it is. Eighteen months seems a reasonable timeframe to do the work, including all the testing, packaging, and moving the port into the then-current code stream for release and support.

As for browsers on Linux, this isn't a bad argument either, on the surface. Domino developers have known for a long time that you have to be browser version aware, and you have to write code for IE (Internet Explorer) and Netscape separately. IE is now by far the most dominant browser; I've seen 98% penetration quoted as a figure. Any browser on a competing platform to Windows has to be IE-compatible to quite a high degree. Otherwise it just isn't going to be widely used, and Netscape 7 is closer to IE than earlier versions.