The Notes 8 installation went smoothly, lulling me into thinking everything was fine. I started up the client, answered the configuration questions, and watched it open. Then, instead of seeing a Getting Started page with information on Notes, I saw an ugly grey box, like the one in Figure A, with the message "org.eclipse.swt.browser.Browser: No more handles [Unknown Mozilla path (MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME not set)]".

FIGURE A


No more handles means no Notes love. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Since OpenSuse 10.3 wasn't on IBM's list of supported operating systems (they support the enterprise edition, but not the community variant) I couldn't just ask for help. There were several items on Notes.net referencing MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME. But, for every fix posted, at least one person had replied to say it didn't work for them. I didn't have any better luck. So I kept looking.

I found something at Eclipse.org saying the problem was with Eclipse, not the programs using Eclipse. While interesting, this wasn't helpful. Then I realized it said a Java library might be missing. Eclipse needs to be able to find something named libgtkembedmoz.so.

I finally found the file on my machine, hiding under /usr/local/seamonkey. I retried the fixes from Notes.net.

One person suggested changing the Lotus install script -- install.sh -- to point to unspecified Mozilla files. I saved a copy of the original script and created a new one pointing MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME to /usr/local/seamonkey. After removing and re-installing Notes as root, I still had the ugly grey screen. I copied libgtkembedmoz.so to /usr/lib, changed install.sh again, and...it still didn't work.

So I counted to ten, went to Starbucks, and started over.

Someone said to add the file when recompiling Firefox. I declined the effort. Another person suggested typing in (where they didn't say) "export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/firefox". Since the file Eclipse needed wasn't in the Firefox directory on my machine, I opened a terminal window and typed in the command "export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/local/seamonkey".

I started the Notes client from the menu. Still no good. Then I realized typing a command in the terminal window only affects that window. After counting to 100, I tried loading the Notes executable from the terminal window. At least it was a different error.