Installing IBM Lotus Symphony Office Suite on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon

Still bored and don’t really feel like doing anything taxing to my already diminishing stamina, I decided to take on IBM’s new Office suite, the Lotus Symphony.

The name Lotus Symphony was first used by Lotus for it’s Integrated Software, released for DOS. It’s regarded as the follow-on of Lotus previous spreadsheet application, the Lotus 1-2-3. The current Lotus Symphony is based on OpenOffice 1.1.4. It has 3 modules, a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation program. The version 1 was released on May 30th, 2008

I was planning to download the Windows version. Visiting the download page, I saw there are installer for Windows and Linux. Currently, only Red Hat and Suse are officially supported. I went ahead and download the Linux Installer.

Installing was easy. Open a terminal, and type:

$sudo ./IBM_Lotus_Symphony_linux.bin

Then I was greeted by “blank” wizard window.

A quick search on google tell me that, due to a bug, the installer won’t work when a composite window manager is present. So I changed my window manager to metacity:

$metacity –replace

Or, if Compiz Fusion Icon is availabe, right-clicked on it, go to “select window manager” and select metacity.

And restart the installer again. This time it works. And refused to install because I don’t have the necessary 500 MB-ish free space on /opt. A quick df -k show me that I still have about 1 GB on “/”. Oh well.. I decided to create a partition for “/opt” by resizing my fat32 data partition. Fired up gparted, and about 30 minuts later I have an “/opt” partition with 2.5GB of free space. Restart the installation.

Finally it works! The installation wizard works just like any Windows application installer, Keep pressing “next” until the “finish” button appear. The installer created one shortcut to the suite on Applications > Office > IBM Lotus Symphony. I clicked the menu and… nothing happened. Another trip to google land told me that, since I used root account (well, sudo) to install, the .lotus directory on my home/user belonged to root account. So I had to changed that.

$cd /home/ikhsan
$sudo chown -R ikhsan:ikhsan .lotus

Re-clicked on the launcher. It works!

Final thought. Well, if installing an office suit with a wizard requires me to open a terminal twice, IBM still has some homework to do. But then again my Ubuntu version is not officially supported.