Lotus Symphony for Linux: Not Ready for Prime Time
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IBM claims that hundreds of thousands of people have downloaded and presumably installed the IBM Lotus Symphony office productivity suite that comprises a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation manager. That is reason enough to take a look at the productivity suite.
Debian Installation
First, turn off special effects such as Compiz and Beryl if you're running them.
I got the basic ideas for the installation from this article: "Installing the IBM Lotus Symphony Beta 1 Office Suite On Ubuntu 7.04." However, details of the installation have changed since that article was written. With the Ubuntu difference added (the listed commands are all root, so preface them with sudo), they'll probably work just fine with Ubuntu.
I tried installing without the bugfix change of permissions in item #3 in the article; it opened. It also installed a menu entry correctly, from which opening it worked fine. It then promptly crashed when I tried creating a word document. All the permissions look right in the /home/username/.Lotus directory.
The error message was the following, followed by what looks like a list of all the Java options:
JVM terminated. Exit code=160
The problem has been seen before in this and related programs (search using the error message as a search term enclosed in parenthesis.)
These steps installed Lotus Symphony on my Debian workstation:
# chmod +x IBM_Lotus_Symphony_linux.bin # ./IBM_Lotus_Symphony_linux.bin
The bugfix is necessary. The Debian version is as follows:
# cd /home/username # chown -R username:username ./Lotus
Works so far. Appears to pick up all the installed fonts (see Figure 1).
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Figure 1 Lotus Symphony documents UI