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Debian and the Groupwise Client

We use Novell Groupwise at work. Due to my recent successes running Debian on my HP tx1000 laptop, I've found that it has become important for me to have a fully-functioning Groupwise client on my Linux machine. However, I know there are some serious issues getting Novell's GroupWise cross-platform client to work on any Linux distro other than their own. Basically, it boils down to JVM and library versions.

After much digging around on the net, I have gathered the information necessary to make GroupWise work on Debian. I will repeat it here, for anyone who is interested, including myself should I have to rebuild this laptop in the future.

Note that my machine is running AMD64, but I have already set up a 32-bit envrionment in a chroot, for other applications (Google Earth and Skype), so I decided to simply install the Groupwise client into this same chroot, to avoid any compatibility issues. This will also mean that if you're running a 32-bit distro, the instructions should be the same for you as they are here.

Install support packages

Inside the chroot, install the following packages:

  • alien
  • libstdc++5
  • libgtk1.2
  • libglib1.2ldbl
  • sun-java6-jre

Obtain the GroupWise cross-platform client

You'll have to have a Novell Premier login to their site to download this client. Download the tarball appropriate for your location.

Extract the tarball

Inside the tarball, you'll find two RPMs. We're interested in the one called 'gwclient', not the one called 'gwcheck'.

Convert the client RPM to a DEB

Use alien to convert the RPM as follows (be root to do this, or use sudo or fakeroot):

alien novell-groupwise-gwclient-7.0.3-20090121.i586.rpm

Install the package

Use the following command to install the package:

dpkg -i novell-groupwise-gwclient_7.0.3-20090122_i386.deb

Replace the JRE

You'll have to remove the JRE that comes with the GroupWise client and replace it with the Sun JRE:

rm -rf /opt/novell/groupwise/client/jre
ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre /opt/novell/groupwise/client/jre

You're now ready to start the client inside your chroot. Your method to do this will vary, depending on how your chroot is set up. If you' ve followed the instructions in the HOWTO mentioned above, you're probably using schroot, which means you can simply create a symlink called 'groupwise' that points to your do_schroot script.

If you want an icon, you can find it at /opt/novell/groupwise/client/gwclient.png. This can be copied to /usr/share/icons so that you can create a menu entry in your window manager.

Turn off HTML view

I was having trouble reading some messages; Groupwise would simply crash when I double-clicked on a message to open it. Further investigation revealed that native code was causing a segfault in the JVM. I traced this to the web renderer component, which is being used (I think) to render HTML emails. I changed my default compose and default view methods to Plain text, and the problem seems to have gone away. You can do this as follows:

  • From the Tools Menu, Select Options
  • Select the General Tab
  • Set the Default Compose View and Font to Plain Text
  • Set the Default Read View and Font to Plain Text. Check the "force" box
  • Click OK.