Installing Linux mail
I attempted to put Mandrake 10.1 community Ed. on a disk the other night (just to see). Imagine that I have a brand new computer. Onto this machine I put Linux using a main stream distribution RedHat, Mandrake or suchlike. This box is to be used at home, and will be connected to the isp for a few minutes four or five times a week to send and receive e-mail, and sometimes for a little longer to browse the web. What do I need to do to achieve such a set-up? The mandrake distribution was useless for this! It offered to setup ISPs for every country but my own and crashed when I lied. I need some official way to connect to the isp and log in. I use wvdial on RedHat 9, but that only comes on the full set of CDs for 'drake. Some program to fetch the mail from the isp. (eg. fetchmail?) Something to read it and write replies. (I use pine!) A way of sending the mail when the box is connected, and a way of storing mail until the box is connected. Maybe something to kill spam. A web browser. As an ordinary user, I don't want to know about LANs, WANs, dial-on-demand, gateways, routers etc. unless such information is needed for such a basic set-up. I do have (or can get) two nameservers xx.xx.xx.xx and yy.yy.yy.yy, the phone number of the ISP (0845 xxxxxx), a username, and a password. This is the problem that an ordinary home user faces, when moving over to Linux, and I would be interested in the views of other subscribers to ALUG on suitable programs and their configuration. Leon Stedman.
Just start up KPPP and enter the details (its in the Internet menu). Don't use the Mandrake Control Centre (that's for persistent connections, as you have discovered). KPPP is almost exactly the same as the Internet Connection Wizard in Windows. Matt Leon Stedman wrote:
I attempted to put Mandrake 10.1 community Ed. on a disk the other night (just to see).
Imagine that I have a brand new computer. Onto this machine I put Linux using a main stream distribution RedHat, Mandrake or suchlike. This box is to be used at home, and will be connected to the isp for a few minutes four or five times a week to send and receive e-mail, and sometimes for a little longer to browse the web.
What do I need to do to achieve such a set-up? The mandrake distribution was useless for this! It offered to setup ISPs for every country but my own and crashed when I lied.
I need some official way to connect to the isp and log in. I use wvdial on RedHat 9, but that only comes on the full set of CDs for 'drake. Some program to fetch the mail from the isp. (eg. fetchmail?) Something to read it and write replies. (I use pine!) A way of sending the mail when the box is connected, and a way of storing mail until the box is connected. Maybe something to kill spam. A web browser.
As an ordinary user, I don't want to know about LANs, WANs, dial-on-demand, gateways, routers etc. unless such information is needed for such a basic set-up.
I do have (or can get) two nameservers xx.xx.xx.xx and yy.yy.yy.yy, the phone number of the ISP (0845 xxxxxx), a username, and a password.
This is the problem that an ordinary home user faces, when moving over to Linux, and I would be interested in the views of other subscribers to ALUG on suitable programs and their configuration.
Leon Stedman.
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On Mon, 31 Jan 2005, Matt Parker wrote:
Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 22:28:32 +0000 From: Matt Parker <matt@mpcontracting.co.uk> To: ALUG <main@lists.alug.org.uk> Subject: Re: [ALUG] Installing Linux mail
Just start up KPPP and enter the details (its in the Internet menu). Don't use the Mandrake Control Centre (that's for persistent connections, as you have discovered). KPPP is almost exactly the same as the Internet Connection Wizard in Windows.
Matt
I hadn't discovered any such thing, only that it crashed. I took a look in the kdenetwork-kppd-provide package, installed by Mandrake. This looks just the thing, but there was no KPPP on my desktop and no executable file in the package. A look through the packages on the distro and I find one with KPPP, which mandrake did not install. I had to install libpcap and ppp too, and I know that nothing will work without ppp. Looks like Mandrake only did half a job. I can dial the ISP now, but can't log in! Some small error in my set-up I expect. Many thanks. I would not have found KPPP without some clue. Leon Stedman.
Leon asked for:
Some program to fetch the mail from the isp. (eg. fetchmail?)
retchmail, getmail, fetchmail, or quite a few mail clients actually can do that themselves.
Something to read it and write replies. (I use pine!)
PINE isn't free software, so it's a pain to get fixes for it. For text-mode fans, there's elm, mutt, nail, mailutils and there's a MIMEy one. For GUI, I use GNUMail (GNUstep) at the moment, but I think kmail (KDE) and evolution (Gnome) are also popular. I'd avoid Thunderbird until they sort out whether they want to be free software or not, but that's me.
A way of sending the mail when the box is connected, and a way of storing mail until the box is connected.
Pretty much any SMTP server software will do, but nullmailer is designed for this. A little buggy last I tried, though.
Maybe something to kill spam.
popmail will do simple pattern-based deletions. dcc can detect bulk email pretty well, but remember to whitelist your mailing lists.
A web browser.
Gecko-based browsers are the popular ones at the minute. Firefox, Mozilla, galeon. Another view is the kHTML one: konqueror for KDE. There's dillo, but I think that's currently having a painful move from GTK to FLTK. There's links which can do graphical. Some sick freak added image support to w3m, even. I don't think any of those support CSS yet, though. Hope that helps. More at http://www.alug.org.uk/contrib/?InternetSoftware maybe. -- MJR/slef http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
participants (3)
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Leon Stedman -
Matt Parker -
MJ Ray