Mac OS X Lion - My Lotus Notes won’t work!

Ian Raffle  8 August 2011 16:30:23

Lotus Notes on Mac is fine on the whole (so our sharp-suited marketing man tells me). The downloaded OS X Lion upgrade from the App store seemed to work fine. All the same stuff was there, maybe a bit shinier. All his data was still there (thankfully untouched). Even Lotus Notes 8.5.2 seemed fine until suddenly it crashed whilst opening the inbox. Following a small "Oh bother" moment, he restarted it, and it was fine for a while, until it happened again. And again.

Fortunately for us, IBM have also spotted the problem. It seems that a change introduced to the semaphore mechanism (controlling how two processes can access the same item of data) in OS X Lion has caused a problem in Notes. For version 8.5.2 and below, you need to add a value to your Notes Preferences of:

POSIX_SEMAPHORES=1

Restart Notes, and the problem shouldn't occur again.

A fix included in Notes 8.5.3 for Mac should hopefully solve the problem without the need for the change to Preferences.

IBM Technote can be found here: https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21504652