The company, on Monday, unveiled an update to Lotus Notes Version 7 that supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Update 3 and Novell SUSE Linux Desktop for Enterprise 10, due later this year. IBM used the Eclipse open source framework to make a Linux equivalent to Windows and Macintosh versions of Notes, said Arthur Fontaine, senior offering manager at IBM Lotus.

Support for Linux on the desktop has been planned for the next major release of Notes, dubbed "Hannover." However, the company decided to release Notes on Linux before Hannover was complete to provide fuel to what the company sees as a growing Linux application development market, and another incentive for Notes customers who may be contemplating a shift to Linux on the desktop, he said.

Other Linux distributions should be able to run the new Notes client, but IBM is only offering support to licensed customers on Red Hat and Suse, he said.

While Notes on Linux has all the same features as the Windows and Mac versions, there are subtle differences, at least for now. For example, the Linux version will not offer the same kinds of shortcut bars that are available on the Windows and Mac version. And the Notes version released Monday will not allow users to access the Lotus Sametime IM client from within the Notes client environment, Fontaine said.

Those differences should disappear with the arrival of Hannover in 2007, he said.