IBM Notes 9 Social Edition on Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) - Some Tweaking Required

OK, so you've downloaded the Notes 9 Social Edition for Linux, and you want to give it a spin on the latest rev of Ubuntu Linux.

OOPS.

As it turns out, Ubuntu has moved to a newer release of CUPS, the Linux printing subsystem; as a result, Ubuntu 13.04 installs libcups2 instead of the libcupsy2 package Notes expects to find.  So, the install falls flat on its face with a failed dependency.

If you don't mind a bit of debfile editing, you can fix this one yourself.  Basically, we're going to go into the control file for the Notes .deb install file and fix that pesky little dependency.  Here's what you need to do:

• Move the ibm-notes-9.0.i586.deb file into a temporary directory; I used ~/tmp/notes9
• Do a "raw" unpack of the debfile into a subdirectory, like so:
• dpkg-deb -R ibm-notes-9.0.i586.deb ./working
• Move into that subdirectory (~/tmp/notes9/working), then into the DEBIAN subdirectory
• Edit the file named 'control', change the one instance of 'libcupsy2' to 'libcups2', and save your changes.
• Move back up to the unpack directory (~/tmp/notes9/working) and issue this command:
• dpkg-deb -b ../ibm-notes-9.0-FIXED.i586.deb
• Now, move back up to the temporary directory (~/tmp/notes9), and you should see both .deb files.

You may now install Notes 9 and its various addins with the dpkg command, like so:

• sudo dpkg -i ibm-notes-9.0-FIXED.i586.deb
• sudo dpkg -i ibm-sametime-9.0.i586.deb
• sudo dpkg -i ibm-feedreader-9.0.i586.deb
• sudo dpkg -i ibm-opensocial-9.0.i586.deb
• sudo dpkg -i ibm-cae-9.0.i586.deb
• sudo dpkg -i ibm-activities-9.0.i586.deb

So, there you have it - a fully functional Notes 9 Social Edition client for Ubuntu 13.04.  If you haven't taken a look at Notes 9 yet, you should grab the free trial!

UPDATE: I neglected to mention that I specifically tested print capabilities; I didn't notice any problems pointing Notes to libcups2 instead of libcupsy2...