kenswain.com

For those that have missed it. Linux can make OS X look ugly. There I said it!  

http://polishlinux.org/kde/kde-41-visual-changelog-rev-783000/ 

I have been using gmail for my kenswain.com email for a long time now. Once I got my iPhone I grew tired of having the email show up to places and having to mark it read in one. This lead me to use my home desktop, which runs Ubuntu, as an email IMAP email server. The process is much easier then it sounds. I just had to run a few commands and it was up and running.

First there was installing postfix. Postfix is an mail transfer agent (MTA) that is used to deliver email. This is also called an SMTP server after the protocol that it uses to accomplish this task.

ken@desktop: $ sudo apt-get update ken@desktop: $ sudo apt-get install postfix

After that you need to tell postfix to use a maildir. To do this you have to add a line to your /etc/postfix/main.cf.

ken@desktop: $ sudo echo "home_mailbox = Maildir/" >> /etc/postfix/main.cf

Next you need to chose an IMAP server to install. I chose dovecot for its good security record, and ease of configuration.

ken@desktop: $ sudo apt-get install dovecot-imapd

Once you have the install done you need to do some configuration for dovecot to use the correct protocol and also to use maildir. The two place in the file you need to be concerend with in /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf are: protocols = imap imaps mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir

Those are the settings in mine, but make sure to adjust them to how you like.

Now with email access to your box and the ability to send and receive email it is time to get your email from gmail to your local box. You can do this with a product called fetchmail.

ken@desktop: $ sudo apt-get install fetchmail

Now it is time to configure fetchmail to get email automatically. This is a fairly easy process.

ken@desktop: $ sudo vim /etc/fetchmail.rc

and add

set daemon 15 set syslog set postmaster localuser

poll pop.gmail.com with proto POP3 and options no dns user 'someone@gmail.com' with pass "password" is 'localuser' here options ssl smtphost localhost

Once that is done you need to enable the fetchmail daemon to start. To do this just edit /etc/default/fetchmail and change

START_DAEMON=no to START_DAEMON=yes

Once that is done just start the fetchmail service and you are good to go. Open the imap port on your router and change your email account in mail.app and resync your phone and you should be ready to enjoy Email goodness.

There are lots of us geeks that run Linux full time at home or the office. We have become good at getting our systems stable and fully functional. That being said there are times when we have to run windows programs in Linux. We have had Wine for this task for a longtime now, but some times it can be hard to configure for newbies and it does not always look that good.

In comes Wine-doors. This program automates the configuration of Wine and installation of applications. If you still need to run Windows apps on Linux I highly recommend this app.

My buddy Daniel recommended Sabayon Linux. Well I am wanting to try and redo my home desktop and I decided to give it a try. I will be doing some updates to tell you guys how it is going. I know since it is based on Gentoo that it might take some time to install, but I am hoping they minimize this impact.

Update 1

So far my updates are going pretty smooth. I have got compiz working as well as my basic environment setup. I am about to do an update and then we will see what breaks.

END

Update 2

Well I have become disillusioned with this desktop.  While I love Gentoo and like some of the features of this distro I feel that Ubuntu is a more complete solution. I am going to give it a little more time before I blow it away, but it is not looking good.

End Update