Foole's Journal: GroupWise in debian

Inspired by their acquisition of Ximian, i thought i'd take a look at Novell's ports for linux.

I like to jump in the deep end sometimes to see how well I go. I set myself the challenge of installing GroupWise on my Debian box. Google has been my friend thru this, especially when the only mention of whatever error i'm getting is in German.

alien was very handy for converting the RPMs. The installation of eDirectory (required by GrouWise) went fairly well. I did have to do a bit of hacking on the install script so it would use dpkg instead of rpm, and I had to learn a few of their terms.

I know a little about LDAP so it wasn't all new to me, but it seems that Novell like making you think up names for lots of things. To log in to ConsoleOne (the directory admin program) I have to enter a username, password, tree name and context.

I have only been able to get this login to work by adding the tree name as an alias for my directory server in /etc/hosts. I can't see how to add it to my dns server to get the same result.

I've also had some problems with their java package. When I ran ConsoleOne with it, it just continued to eat memory until it crashed, killing galeon along the way. Hacking the ConsoleOne launch script to use /usr/bin/java fixed that, altho some of the plugins arent showing up. I didn't have this problem on my suse system.

The next step was GroupWise. Luckily I have suse on my laptop, so I got to see how the install runs normally. The python based install program for GroupWise refused to run without specific versions of librpm installed; none of which are available to me as debian packages.

I aliened the GroupWise rpms and installed most of them. This needed the --force-conflicts because many of the files are in more than one package.

I'm currently trying to configure GroupWise using ConsoleOne. I REALLY wish I knew the relevance of all the names this thing is asking me for. A system name, a domain name, a postoffice name. With my first few attempts, I got all the way thru before it telling me one of the names conflicted with something else. When I went back and fixed it, it told me my database folder already contained a database so it couldn't use it. I had to kill ConsoleOne (it had one of the db files open), rm -rf the db folder, restart ConsoleOne and try again. After doing this a couple of times I start wondering why I'm still trying.

The reason is, I am frustrated by the mail programs I have used under Linux. I want a client/server mail system so I can access the same data store from different computers running different operating systems. I also want to be able to add properties to my messages, tasks, contacts etc.

I am hoping GroupWise will fill this need.

All the linux mail programs I have used seem to think the height of client/server mail is IMAP. After using Outlook and Exchange for a few years, IMAP looks pitiful to me. (If there is a way for IMAP to support adding arbitrary typed properties to messages and a client and server which support this, please let me know)

It would be nice if Novell made a portable mail client (not evolution unless they complete redo the backend interface.. again) which could be used as a plain pop3/maildir client and could be hooked up to a GroupWise server. A good flexible mail client/PIM will get people using the program and make them strongly consider the GroupWise server.

Anyway.. back to having another guess at what to call my system, domain, postoffice etc.