IBM Notes 9.0.1, MacOS High Sierra, and Java 8. Part 2.

After I wrote my Jan 24 post about running Notes on MacOS in Basic Mode, IBM released Notes 9.0.1 for MacOS Interim Fix 13. IF13 provides a fix for the problem I described in that post, which was that upgrading Java on the Mac to a version higher (more recent) than Java 8 Update 151 caused Notes to fail to start. That surprised me because, on the Windows platform Notes provides its own JVM; you can install whatever Oracle JVMs you like under Windows without affecting Notes at all. But it turns out that Notes running on the MacOS platform does not come with its own JVM and does rely on the Oracle JVM that you install on the machine. And, of course, Java 8 Update 152 caused Notes to choke and die.

In any case, the workaround at that time was to run Notes in Basic Mode, which effectively reverts Notes to running the old Release 7 Notes client written in C++, naked of the Expeditor wrapper that provides the new features of  Notes that debuted in Release 8. In Basic Mode, Notes does not use any Java-based features.

Another odd thing that I discovered since writing my last post is that the Notes 9.0.1 installer for the MacOS platform is "broken" with respect to MacOS High Sierra. The first time you run it on a machine running MacOS, it fails in the Provisioning stage, with the following error message:

File /Applications/IBM Notes.app/Contents/MacOS/rcp/rcplauncher.properties not found. Provisioning process failed to launch or was terminated before status could be determined.

Then the installation fails.

The fix for this is, of all things, to rerun the installer. The second time around it succeeds all the way through. Go figure.