dkpw – Wicked Fire

The GroupWise client is not natively available on any Linux distribution, other than Novell offerings such as SLED and OpenSuSE. I’m not sure if it is officially available on the latter.

The good news is that with a little jiggery-pokery you can install it onto other distros. Here’s what to do with the ever-popular Ubuntu. I have tested this method on Debian 4 and 5 and Ubuntu 8.10, 9.04 and 9.10 with GroupWise 7 and 8 clients for Linux.

1. Download the latest GroupWise installation packages from novell.com.

2. Extract this into a folder of your choice. You will normally see two RPMs and an installer script. You only need to retain the client RPM which will be named something like: novell-groupwise-gwclient-8.0.0HP-85855.i586.rpm

3. There is a handy program called Alien which can convert RPM packaages to the deb packages which are used by Ubuntu and Debian. You obviously need to install Alien and then run this command at the command line:

sudo alien -d novell-groupwise-gwclient-8.0.0HP-85855.i586.rpm

This will take a few minutes and then create a deb file ready to install. Before you do, there are a few other steps.

4. The key to getting GroupWise working is to ensure you have not only C++ packages installed but also a working version of the Java Runtime Environment. Novell  packages it’s own JVM which does not want to play with other distros. First, open Synaptic and  check that you have libstdc++5 installed.

5. Next go to http://www.java.com/en/download/index.jsp and download the latest version of Sun’s JRE. You may have other versions of the JRE or JVM installed by default in Ubuntu and Debian, but using this method guarantees GroupWise will work and should not affect anything else.

6. In Ubuntu, extract the java file inside the /usr/lib/jvm directory. With this command:

sudo ./jre-6u13-linux-i586.bin

This will create a directory called jre1.60_13 for example, to which we will point the GroupWise client, rather than let it use its own JVM.

7. You can now install the GroupWise package you created with Alien. The easiest way is to double click the .deb file and install it. Make sure you have closed Synaptic and all other software installers.

8. Installing the GroupWise client will create the following directory structure.

/opt/novell/groupwise/client/

You will find a sub-directory called JRE which we need to delete and create a link to the new JRE from the newly installed Sun package. So…

cd /opt/novell/groupwise/client/
sudo rm -R jre
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/jre1.6.0_13 /opt/novell/groupwise/client/jre

These commands take you to the GroupWise client directory, remove the default Novell JRE and create a link to the Sun version.

I would next recommend that you try launching GroupWise from the command line as this will tell you whether or not you have any missing dependencies. These are easy to remedy via installs using Synaptic. Simply type the word “groupwise” at the command line.

Hope this helps you.

Tags: Linux, Tech Stuff, Ubuntu

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