thoughts on IBM lotus symphony

[BDNiner]

http://symphony.lotus.com

I have not found a post on this subject in these forums yet. What are people's thoughts on IBM and their plans for open office. If there is decent integration with lotus notes and domino servers then i think this product will be great. I for one would like more products aimed at the corporate desktop market. It i9s currently only available for RPM based distros like SUSE and Redhat. Maybe someone here will figure out how to get it to run on Ubuntu.

[dkpelder]

Actually, I found that it runs with no modification on Ubuntu. I simply downloaded the Linux file (which does require registration) and it worked as is.

[dkpelder]

One thing that I forgot to mention is that the installer seems to want to run with root privileges which isn't too unusual but the applications themselves also want to run with the same level of privilege. I also forgot to mention that it ran fine for me from the command line. I just tried it from the menu shortcut and did not have the same success so I'm trying to figure out how to tweak the menu item to allow a successful invocation from there.

[gers4302]

I'm experiencing the same problem. It installs fine on Gutsy, but must be run via sudo.

The font rendering is a bit nasty. For me, 10pt Arial looks fine, but 10pt Arial Bold looks like a blobby mess.

[Permafrost91]

I installed the Linux version on 32 bit Gusy which, as already mentioned, required sudo privileges. But unlike dkpelder or gers4302, my installation (into /opt/ibm/lotus/Symphony, the default install folder), I do not require sudo privileges to run LS. The menu shortcuts did not work for me at first but now they do (not sure what changed with them). The only thing I can think of is that I associated LS with all office documents on my computer (through LS's preferences). I haven't really had many problems since then (a few crashes here or there though). It's definitely still beta quality.

By the way, is this based on OpenOffice.org? IBM did send 30 some developers over to that dev-team and I was wondering whether LS uses OOo's core.

[Permafrost91]

I just now saw that gers4302 posted a second before me and I have to agree that bold fonts don't look very pretty (although I have to admit that I'm having the same problems in OOo with MS Office documents).

[LaRoza]

Is it for anyone else downloading slowly? 4-10 kbs for me, while everything else is in th 100's.

[kaamos]

IBM seems to be rolling out every possible desktop app as eclipse add-ons.. But it was STILL a surprise to notice that it was the case with this one as well!

[dkpelder]

Yes this is based on Open Office and I figured out (for me at least) how to get the menu items working. The installation creates a <home directory>/lotus directory. For me the initial owner for that directory was root as was the initial group. Once I changed the owner and group to my user name and my group, everything worked as it should have.

It seems that IBM underestimated the amount of traffic they would receive because the download speed for this is pretty slow right now (and has been since this morning).

[Permafrost91]

ah, that makes sense ... I deleted that directory thinking it was only needed during the install but going back to my home folder now I see that it has since been recreated. Not sure I like that though ... is there a way to not have this "lotus" folder created? Or at least keep it hidden?