Thomas Hampel

 3 May 2011
Installing Lotus Notes on Linux is rather simple, the UI starts right away without any problems.
However if you happen to run command level operations such as compact or fixup you may run into problems because the following error message may appear:

"error while loading shared libraries: libnotes.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory"

Notes is complaining it can’t find libnotes.so which normally resides in the /usr/lib folder on your machine.
All you have to do is to create some links so that the Notes/Domino code can find this file

To do so you will have to be root or have sudo rights and execute the following commands
sudo ln -s /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/libnotes.so /usr/lib/libnotes.so
sudo ln -s /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/libndgts.so /usr/lib/libndgts.so
sudo ln -s /opt/ibm/lotus/notes/libxmlproc.so /usr/lib/libxmlproc.so

or if you want a more propper solution, use those commands (thanks to Brian for reminding me)

# Create the conf file and put into place
echo “/opt/ibm/lotus/notes” >/tmp/lotus-notes.conf
sudo install -m 644 /tmp/lotus-notes.conf /etc/ld.so.conf.d/

# Tell the linker to use it
sudo ldconfig

Note: Of course all these commands refer the the standard Notes client installation directories, which you may need to adjust to fit your installation.