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/

Posted in linux at February 26th, 2008. No Comments.

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..

Posted in linux at February 26th, 2008. No Comments.

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.

Posted in linux at February 25th, 2008. No Comments.

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

Good luck!

Posted in linux at February 22nd, 2008. No Comments.

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.

Posted in docbook at February 21st, 2008. No Comments.

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..

Posted in linux at February 16th, 2008. No Comments.

Jag har börjat testa Eclipse som utvecklingsmiljö. Det främsta skälet var nog egentligen att jag inte hittade någon användbar LaTeX-redigerare i Windows XP. Jag ville ha inbyggt subversionstöd i editorn, då jag har mina dokument och kod i subversion. Nu sitter jag med en fullfjädrad utvecklingsmiljö för många språk och uppgifter:

  • TeXlipse som ger mig stöd för LaTeX.
  • Subclipse som ger mig stöd för Subversion.
  • PDT som ger mig stöd för PHP
  • CDT som ger mig stöd för C++
  • Stödet för Java fanns redan med i Eclipse, så jag har inte lagt till något speciellt för det.

Och innan jag började skriva detta inlägg laddade jag ner Omondo EclipseUML för UML. Har inte hunnit testa det än.

Eclipse verkar mycket lovande och jag skall fortsätta använda det ett tag. Fri programvara utan kostnad som klarar av mycket av det jag tidigare använt flera olika program för.. dessutom på både Linux och Windows. Jag är imponerad!

Posted in development at January 7th, 2008. No Comments.