MEETING MINUTES: -
January 13th
Members attending
the meeting included: Richard
Foerster, Alan Shoemaker, Don Evinger, Dave Reisz,
Kandy Phan, Hung Nguyen, Isaac Saldana and new member Forrest
Sherman. New members, Dana Rodden Dick Mathews, Mark DiNicolai and Karl Pomroy
were unable to make the meeting.
Hopefully they will be able attend our February meeting. Also missing at
this meeting were Ken Howells, Tad Peters, and Craig Carignan.
Forrest brought in his 7.1 Slackware based system to show
members the project that he has been working on. Forrest is currently
developing web applications for on-line community and e-tailing projects.
In particular he provided a look at OpenACS 3.2.
OpenACS (Open ArsDigita Community System) is
an advanced toolkit for building scalable, community-oriented web
applications. It relies on
AOLserver, a
web/application server, and
PostgreSQL, a
true ACID-compliant RDBMS. These are two high-quality products available for
free under open-source licenses. AOLserver is a multithreaded, Tcl-enabled
web server used for large scale, dynamic web sites.
OpenACS is available under the GNU General Public License, which makes it
open-source. This means you can use it and modify it in any way you want. If
you choose to redistribute OpenACS, you must do so under the terms of the GNU
license. You are thus free to use OpenACS for commercial and
non-commercial use.
Alan mentioned that Helix has changed
their name to Ximian (which is pronounced
ZIM-ee-un) differs from their old name in that it can be trademarked.
Ximian™, formerly known as Helix Code, is the leading open source desktop
company who's stated goal is to "create the world's best desktop
environment, bringing ease of use to Linux and Unix systems
everywhere".
The Ximian GNOME Desktop is a complete desktop environment for regular
people. It includes all the toolkit and core GNOME libraries, the GNOME
desktop, and a full set of applications. Ximian's desktop team updates,
polishes, and tests every element of the desktop before distribution.
Isaac mentioned that he has recently installed WebMail
on the systems he administers, and he really thinks it is neat. WebMail
is a WWW mail application that allows users to manage IMAP or POP3 mailboxes via
an easy-to-use WWW-interface. It may be used, for example, to give users access
to their mailboxes from anywhere in the world. It is written in Java and should
run at least on the most popular Unix platforms. WebMail can run on its
own HTTP server (users just have to point their browser to the configured server
and port) or can be run as a Java Servlet. On the clientside, only a
frames-capable browser is needed, no Javascript or Java.
Another alternative to consider is EMUmail
which comes on the Mandrake 7.1 contributions disk. EMU 3 is a web-based
email program that allows users to read their POP/IMAP E-mail via any HTML
browser. Runs from your own web server. EMUmail allows anyone access to their
E-mail anytime, anywhere using any web browser. EMU 3 is a powerful webmail
program with abundant features that make using E-mail a breeze for even the most
novice users. EMUmail is easy to install and maintain and is fully configurable
and customizable by your systems administrator. you can download a free trial
version, which can be used for an unlimited amount of time with unlimited users
this version carries banner advertising and a tag line. UNIX and Windows NT free
trial versions available. A licensed version carries no advertising and is fully
customizable. Isaac said he got WebMail at freshmeat.net
where you can also find more information on EMUmail.
In a discussion about K-Mail and Netscape Mail, Dave Reisz explained the process
he uses to work with email, relying on fetchmail, procmail, mutt, and x-buffy.
Fetchmail is a
full-featured, robust, well-documented remote-mail retrieval and forwarding
utility intended to be used over on-demand TCP/IP links (such as SLIP or PPP
connections). It supports every remote-mail protocol now in use on the Internet:
POP2, POP3, RPOP, APOP, KPOP, all flavors of IMAP,
and ESMTP ETRN. It can even support IPv6 and IPSEC.
Fetchmail retrieves mail from remote mail servers and forwards it via SMTP,
so it can then be be read by normal mail user agents such as mutt,
elm(1) or BSD Mail.
Procmail can be used to create
mail-servers, mailing lists, sort your incoming mail into separate folders/files
(real convenient when subscribing to one or more mailing lists or for prioritizing
your mail), preprocess your mail, start any programs upon mail arrival (e.g. to
generate different chimes on your workstation for different types of mail) or
selectively forward certain incoming mail automatically to someone. Dave
mentioned that one of the attractive aspects that it uses regular expressions
to select and filter your mail.
Mutt is a
small but very powerful text-based mail client for Unix operating systems
XBuffy
was written by Bill Pemberton (wfp5p@virginia.edu) and was based on Xmultibiff.
It allows the user to specify multiple mail folders which XBuffy will watch for
incoming mail is a program that displays how many unread mails you have
in your different mailboxes. You can have different titles for the mailboxes,
and define what shall happen when a new mail arrives. It can beep and invoke a
shell command, for example.
Isaac also discussed some of the problems he recently
encountered with library compatibility when upgrading his system from Red Hat
6.2 to version 7.
The
meeting was a great success, and we are all looking forward to our next session
on February 10th, 2001
