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/