Re: procmail and kmail

[Martin P Holland <nospam [at] noether.freeserve.co.uk>]

On Fri, 18 Feb 2000, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>My advice is to ditch the K environment, 

What on earth are you ranting about Stephen?  ;-)
What has a desktop enviroment got to do with setting up
sendmail/fetchmail properly? Nothing. So ditching or retaining KDE will
neither help nor hinder.

BTW, I wrote some simple (I think) notes at http://www.noether.freeserve.co.uk
on setting up fetchmail and sendmail for my ISP that might help people
who are struggling. (If the emails I get are any guide it has helped quite few
people.)

To get back to the serious discussion about the HOWTOs etc. Here is my 2p.
Many of the HOWTOs contain extremely useful information but the vast majority
of them are extremely off-putting to a beginner. (Some are also out of
date.) Part of this is historical. The strength of linux has definitely been in
a server enviroment. Its ascent on the desktop is a relevantly recent
phenomenon and new users are flooding in. Most of these new users aren't
setting up servers they fall into a group that I would call the Home User.

Def: A Home User has a linux box at home (possibly not
even on a LAN) which is periodically connected by dial-up to the internet
and is being used as a desktop workstation as a drop-in replacement for
win98/98.

In fact I would guess that the majority of linux users are Home Users
in this sense. (This is all presumption on my part of course, any one know any
hard information?)

There is a distincy lack in the HOWTOs of concise infromation
_targeted_ at these particular users. The info is all there of course, but you
have to read carefully, interpret, have some experience (certainly
an unreasonable expectation for new users). Since (I claim) Home Users are in
the majority this means that there is a gap.

I think that there is need for a dial-up-user-HOWTO that addresses issues like
sendmail, fetchmail, named, ipchains concisely based on the needs in this
particuar case (or perhaps a sequence of mini-HOWTOs). The notes on my noether
page are an attempt at something like this. There are two main faults with
it at the moment. 1. It is, superficially at least, too freeserve (my ISP)
dependent. 2. It is too RH dependent. I tried to make things as
distro-independent as possible but have been hampered as I only have RH to play
with. I would welcome any suggestions to make things more distro-independent.

atb
Martin
 -- 
http://www.shef.ac.uk/~pm1mph



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