Because I am insane, I decided to install Domino on my newly-minted 768 slice from Slicehost. That's just above the 512MB RAM minimum that Domino demands and half the recommended 1.5GB, so we'll see how it goes.

The Linux installation I went with for my slice was Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit, which firmly puts it into the realm of unsupported, as far as Domino is concerned. Fortunately, three pages I found made the process relatively painless:

1. http://www.collaborationmatters.com/blog/cmblog.nsf/dx/installing-lotus-domino-8.5.2-on-ubuntu-server?opendocument&comments
2. http://www.danilodellaquila.com/blog/how-to-install-lotus-domino-8.5-on-ubuntu-part-ii
3. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3747789/how-to-install-sun-jdk-on-ubuntu-10-10-maverick-meerkat

The first wrinkle you run across is that Domino adores Java, but stock Linux installs do not. Fortunately, link #3 there explains how to cleanly install Java on your server. Namely, add this line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu maverick partner

Once you do that, you can run apt-get install sun-java6-jre, wince at the huge number of dependencies it requires, and let it do its thing.

After that, you're almost ready to start installing. If you're running on a 64-bit installation, you'll need the standard 32-bit libraries, since I don't think there's yet a 64-bit Domino server for any-old-Linux. That one's easy, though: apt-get install ia32-libs and you're all set.

The Domino installation proper was relatively straightforward. I created a "notes" user and associated group beforehand, picked and created some directories for the program files and data owned by that user, and went through its command-line wizard via ./install -console . For the final step, I told it to expect a remote installation and fired up the Remote Server Setup tool on Windows, which worked flawlessly.

The next step was the FP2 installer. As is the case with the Windows version, the installer for the fix packs is totally different than the normal installer for some reason. It initially complained about the size of my Terminal window and, rather than trying to convince it that my GUI terminal was plenty good enough for its installer, I took its advice and did export LOTUS_NOROWCOLCHECK=1 . After that, it complained about needing to know where the data directory was, but provided a similar instruction for setting that variable. Once that was in order, the installation went smoothly.

The next tough part was how to get Domino to run at startup. I've been familiar from time to time with various *nixes and their service setups, but it seems to change every couple of years, so I wasn't sure where to go with this. Fortunately, link #2 above did all the work for me. Since I found it long after installation, I didn't do the "customized distribution" bit, but I DID grab the Domino init script. Once I put that in place, modified the variables to point to my directories and user, and followed the other instructions, I was all set. Now I can control Domino via "service domino (start|stop|restart)" like you'd expect.

Due to the nature of Linux, the question of where to keep the program and data directories is a weird one. The defaults are something like "/opt/ibm/lotus" and "/local/notesdata", respectively, which would certainly WORK, but don't fit in with much else. I've fiddled with my placement a bit and settled on the same thing for the former, but "/var/lib/domino/data" for the latter. That allowed me to set up "/var/lib/domino/daos" and "/var/lib/domino/logdir" (for transaction logging) and keep things relatively clean. One thing to note: if you switch around the directories after the fact, make sure to change both the init script and the notes.ini in your program directory to reflect the new locations.

All told, it seems to be working pretty well. When you're using it like a normal Notes server, there's not much distinction other than the lack of OLE. It has all the same bugs (like the aggravating XPages Java classloader "X is not compatible with X" errors I run into constantly) and same features, which is really the idea.