Lotus Notes 8 and wrestling with attachments in Linux

A gripe about opening attachments in Lotus Notes 8 is that LN will fail silently, leaving the user guessing whether things are happening or not. If a user double clicks on an attachment, a dialog will pop up requesting if the user wants to "Open", "Edit", "View", "Save" or "Cancel".

Clicking on View for me gives a strange error: "Unable to create view: Device is disposed" and gives a whole load of eclipse errors in the details. I dont have the time to figure that one out.

So the next best thing is to "Open" the attachment. However that doesn't do anything, and LN fails to report that something has failed. The solution for this however is available here: "IBM - Attachments do not open from Lotus Notes for Linux Client when Open, Edit, or View is chosen in the 'Open Attachment' dialog" The trick is to remove IBM's own "openwith" program with whichever desktop manager you happen to install.

# sudo mv /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/openwith /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/openwith.old
# sudo ln -s $(which kde-open) /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/openwith

It works, but its amazing that we have to jump through these hoops just to open attachments!

yk