GroupWise client in Ubuntu

I am using Novell GroupWise for my email at work and had some problems installing the Linux GroupWise client in Ubuntu 7.10. This is how I got it to work.

Before you start, make sure you have Java6 installed. If not install sun-java6-jre :

$ sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre

First I downloaded the client from http://download.novell.com/ (requires a free Novell account). The client is shipped in a tar-gz archive: gw701clnxm.tgz .

When extracting it I got two RPM:s to install from, the client is in novell-groupwise-gwclient-7.0.1-20060613.i386.rpm . Ubuntu doesn't do RPM:s so well, so I installed alien:

$ sudo apt-get install alien

With alien I could convert the RPM to a DEB-package, that is installable in Ubuntu:

$ sudo alien -c novell-groupwise-gwclient-7.0.1-20060613.i386.rpm

After converting I got novell-groupwise-gwclient_7.0.1-20060614_i386.deb in the same folder as the RPM. Now it was time to install the DEB in Ubuntu:

$ sudo dpkg -i novell-groupwise-gwclient_7.0.1-20060614_i386.deb

To start the GroupWise client I typed:

$ /opt/novell/groupwise/client/bin/groupwise

Everything seemed to work, but the client went all grey. I got an idea that it might be the JRE (Java) that GroupWise is shipped with that was the problem. So I deleted the jre-directory and symlinked it to java-6-sun :

$ sudo rm -rf /opt/novell/groupwise/client/jre
$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre /opt/novell/groupwise/client/jre

Now everything was working.


To get an nice GroupWise icon on your desktop, just copy the .desktop file:

$ cp /opt/novell/groupwise/client/gwclient.desktop ~/Desktop/

GNOME Bluetooth

I tried to browse my cellphone from the bluetooth-applet in GNOME and got an ugly error.


Translated to english it would be:

"obex://[00:19:63:96:52:b2]" is not a valid location.

Solution was to install gnome-vfs-obexftp:

$ sudo apt-get install gnome-vfs-obexftp

The problem seems to be that Nautilus doesn't support (understand) the OBEX-protocol. This should have been installed with the bluetooth-applet..

Xnested

I wanted to take some screenshots from Ubuntu for some educational material I am writing. I was wondering how I could take a screenshot on login without running Ubuntu in a virtual environment.

I found xnest. xnest runs a x server inside the running x server. Installed by:

$ sudo apt-get install xnest

Then I used the command gdmflexiserver to start a GDM inside of xnest:

$ gdmflexiserver -n

I noticed that I could not login as the same user that had started gdmflexiserver. I created a new account on my computer and login went fine.

You want the sources for SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE)-products? They are kind of hard to find, but there is sources available:

• SLE Sources
  
• Linux Security Advisories (patches)
• Source RPM repository for SLE10 (need Novell Account for this)
  

Good luck!

I am writing a book about Java 6 programming, the basics. My intention is to use it at my work as a teacher in high-school. First I used LaTeX for typesetting the book, LaTeX is nice I think. But today I suddenly changed my mind and converted it to DocBook/XML . Don't ask me why - I just thought it was a good idea.

So there I was, five chapters written and ready for being sent to my friend for proof-reading. Typed the command:

$ jw -f docbook -b pdf dtr1207.xml

I got many errors like this:
openjade:/home/jonas/dtr1207-java/dtr1207.xml:303:9:E: non SGML character number 150

It seemed to be the char "Ö" that were the problem. I changed it to "ö" and the pdf were built fine. But I couldn't change every Ö in my text to ö just because of a stupid buildprocess. Google wasn't very helpful either. Then suddenly I read about SP_ENCODING.

$ SP_ENCODING="UTF-8" jw -f docbook -b pdf dtr1207.xml

SP_ENCODING can be set to XML or UTF-8. If it is set to XML it will read the XML-tag in document and use that encoding, I choosed to force it to be UTF-8.

Installing openSUSE 10.3 with windowmanager XFCE4 was quite tricky. Here I'll explain how I did.

I installed from openSUSE 10.3 DVD on an empty hard-drive. On page Desktop Selection I did choose : Other -> Text Mode.

On next page (Installation Settings) I clicked on Software and checked the XFCE Desktop Environment pattern.

After installation XDM did start. When I logged in, I discovered that my windowmanager was FVWM2 - not XFCE4! This was easily fixed. I logged in as root on a console and opened the configurationfile /etc/sysconfig/windowmanager and changed DEFAULT_WM to startxfce4 .

Restarted XDM with command rcxdm restart and logged in. XFCE4 was starting up..