Lotus Notes 8.5 on Mac has a wonderful little installation preflight check to prevent you from installing the software on a PPC machine. At least, that’s the intent - what it actually does is prevent the software from being installed on a non-recognised Intel machine. Now, there is more than one reason why this installation check will fail, and leave you high and dry, and it’s very frustrating. For me, I’m installing it in a VMware virtual Machine. VMware helpfully identifies it’s CPU as, in my case, 2.8GHz Unknown. Notes doesn’t know how to deal with this, so just to be safe, it doesn’t install. Never fear, I’ve dug around in the installer packages and a solution is at hand. Find your Lotus Notes Installer.mpkg file, and right-click to Show Package Contents. Navigate through to the folders Contents and then Packages and then do the same right-click on the Lotus Notes Installer.pkg file. Once more, go into the Contents folder and the Resources folder. There will be a file in here called InstallationCheck - in the finder it has a black “exec” Unix Executable icon. Open this up with your favourite text editor. There will be a line that says:
# Prevent user to install standard on PowerPC
Delete everything from this line, down to, and including the line that says “fi” - eight lines in total, counting blanks. Save this file and proceed to install with no pesky CPU check. How to manually modify the installation check with the Lotus Notes 8.5 installer for Mac to bypass the CPU requirements check and install on a CPU that’s not strictly recognised as being not PPC