A while back, I decided to install Lotus Connections at work to ease communication, enable all important project awareness and to share our common links etc. First thing that caught my eye were system specs. Now, I don’t mean to be rude, but it looks like one would need NASA supercomputer just to run this thing.  I knew there was no way I would get these specs by my boss (specially, since we are not that big company) and thus I decided to ditch all that and go for a Virtual Machine with single CPU, 4GB of RAM and 100GB of disk space.

Also, to  run Connections on Linux you must use WebSphere Application server. Now, I don’t mind WSAS per-se, but it is a massive system, that ends up using more resources you would want.

After I got the operating system up and running, I prepared myself for installation. I installed Sametime and Sametime Gateway on Linux many times before, but this was a new experience all together. As we use IBM partner sites to download I needed to upload files to the server, decompress them and run each application one by one. 

First attempt… failure. Why? Well, according to online help, I missed a step at pre-install and some other apparently required OS applications  were not installed. After much fiddling, I first located those and install them. Then removed installation and tried again.

Second attempt… failure. Apparently, one must install an upgrade for WSAS, as the one included when downloading is way too old. OK, so I patch WSAS, remove the installation and run installation process again.

Third attempt… failure. This time, I missed the create databases step. So, I removed installation and tried again. 

Fourth attempt… success. Finally. And it worked too :).

Now, as I said, I am not exactly a noob when it comes to installing Lotus apps on Linux, but the thing that always bothered me with STGW and now Lotus Connections is that there is no wizard that would guide you through the installation. It would simplify things a lot or at least, prevent me to miss some necessary steps on the way.

Alternatives

After all this time wasting process, I started to wander myself. Is integration with Lotus environment really worth the hassle? I mean, you can set up Apache server (which is easier to maintain that WSAS and definitely less resource consuming), install open source forums (e.g. phpBB), wiki (e.g. MediaWiki), bookmark and link sharing and a project management tool. Granted, it will never be Lotus integrated, but it would save you loads of time, money and resources.