Running Lotus Notes 6.5.x with Wine

I recently needed Lotus Notes 6.5.2 for business purposes, I knew that it kind of worked with Wine and so I gave it a try. Here are my tips for others who have to run Notes under a Unix-like operating system:

  1. Take a wine version which is known to work (20050725) newer ones like 0.9 don’t (at least I couldn’t manage to make it work).
  2. Install the notes client on a Windows box
  3. Adjust all settings on the Windows box
    • set the web browser to notes
    • set the sametime connection to manual
    • configure proper TCP/IP settings and disable everything else (NETBIOS)
  4. Copy the notes directory over to the Linux machine
  5. Copy mfc42.dll and msvcp60.dll from C:\Windows\System32 to ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system
  6. Launch winecfg and set the Windows version to Win98
  7. Run Notes with wine "C:\Program Files\lotusnotes\nlnotes.exe"

Additional hints and help may be found in the comments in Wine’s AppDB, the Lotus Notes IBM forum or over here.

Marc