I stumbled across this announcement earlier today:
On 30 May, 2008 a newer version of the Notes 8.5 Mac OS X client was posted as part of the FULL Notes/Domino 8.5 Beta 1 release.
Based on comments on a post I made March 2008, I decided to download the 355 MB tarball for Mac OS X.
On my first pass, I attempted to install over top of the private-beta client I described in that earlier post. Unfortunately, the provisioning step was partially successful. When I launched the Notes client, Eclipse started up … and shut down …
I used the uninstall app that came with this latest tarball to remove the private-beta client. I then reinstalled the public-beta client, got acknowledgement that provisioning was successful, and ran the Notes client.
In the words of Borat: “Great success!”
The 500-MB-plus public beta client looks similar to the private-beta client, but it feels snappier. Your mileage may vary.
Regardless, it’s encouraging to witness this progress.
In addition to installing IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 Public Beta 1 on Mac OS X (Leopard), I also installed it on a Dell laptop running Ubuntu Hardy Heron – IBM offers a build of the Notes client packaged as a number of .deb files. This was my first experience with a native Notes client for Linux. So far, so good.
Thanks IBM!
P.S. I expect the Release Notes cover off some of the sillyness I’ve shared here …
P.P.S. IBM has a public forum for this beta.
Ian Lumb's Blog 
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