Novell Groupwise Client for Ubuntu

Sometimes Novell can make a Linux fan rip their hair out!

Novell never develops their mainstream products to work outside of SUSE Linux Enterprise. With a few modifications you can get things such as the Novell Client to function with OpenSUSE. However, if you are more of an Ubuntu fan, most of the times you feel left out of the loop by Novell. Due to my refusal to accept this proprietary notion by Novell, I’ve researched, located, and even developed a few work arounds for using Novell products and protocols under Ubuntu.

As an administrator of information services at an educational institution, I have to constantly face managing items like Novell Groupwise and E-Directory. These items consume my time. I don’t have so much time to contend with my work desktop or laptop! Meaning that SUSE just will not work for me…

I mean quite simply I don’t have hours and days to attempt to resolve package dependences on my desktop when I need to be resolving them server side. Thus Ubuntu is my desktop/laptop operating system of choice at work. Over the coming days I will show you how to get the essentials for Novell management to function on an Ubuntu Desktop. As the first part of this series I will show you how to get the Groupwise email client to function on your workstation.

Step One – Download the Groupwise Client and extract

wget http://oit.wvu.edu/groupwise/files/gw801_client_linux_en.tar.gz

tar -xzvf gw801_client_linux_en.tar.gz

Step Two – Use Alien to covert .rpm to .deb installation packages

If you don’t have alien then please run the following commands:

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install alien

Now let’s navigate to the directory which was extracted during step one:

cd gw8.0.1-88138_client_linux_en

Let’s become root:

sudo su

Convert the packages via alien:

alien -c novell-groupwise-client-8.0.1-88138.i586.rpm && alien -c novell-groupwise-gwcheck-8.0.1-88138.i586.rpm

Step Three – Install the package via dpkg

dpkg -i *.deb

Now you should have a desktop icon and an icon under Applications, Internet for Groupwise

Step Four – Marking the desktop Groupwise icon as trusted

Right click on the untrusted Groupwise icon. Click properties, select the permissions tab, and mark as executable.

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You are done. Short of plugging in your Groupwise settings you are ready to go. Have fun and enjoy!

**Note this will not work on x64 systems only i386 because the Groupwise package is developed only under the 32 bit architecture.

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