I just installed Notes 8 on ubuntu using an IBM prepacked deb package. Everything went smootly, the only issue is related to the fonts. Notes has luxy-courier as the default font, and this font is not installed by default on the ubuntu/debian systems. To fix this issue just install the ttf-xfree86-nonfree package, if you are ok with non-free packages. Otherwise change the default font from Luxy-Courier to Arial or Courier.