Baslinux mailing list

[cce.zizkov AT volny.cz]

Hi Sindi,

thank you for your feedback on the mutt add-ons. I think you
discovered a couple of bugs which I will try to repair as soon
as possible. At this moment I have no time to test sending
arbitrary binary attachments myself. You are probably right, that
this feature does not work. Before I have a look at it here,
I will not comment on this. You may find hints in the mutt
manual.

Here are a few preliminary remarks on your problems:

On 14 Oct 04 at 19:13, keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org wrote:

>I have mutt working in BL3 and BL2 now.  The manual says you need
>mime.types in one of three locations.  I notice it is in ~/Mail which is not
>on the list. I mention this because when I try to send a binary attachment
>things sometimes go wrong.

This file will actually be needed. I did not check, whether mutt
reads it or not. Paths of configuration files can be passed to mutt
either at compile time (I suppose the three locations mentioned
above), or by command line parameters or in .muttrc. The script
mu starts mutt with the ~/Mail/.muttrc. You may check whether in
~/Mail/.muttrc there is a line that gives the correct path to an
existing mime.types file.

>
>Text is properly detected and sent as 7-bit ascii.
>gif jpg pdf get sent as base64
>
>But wav and ppm files were detected and attached as quoted iso-8859-2
>which is the E. European charset.  This encoding encodes only the
>upper ASCII characters specially and thus takes up less space than
>plain base64 (which I think encodes all chars as 8-bit).

I have to play with this myself, first.

>So I poked
>around in /root/Mail and found some pertinent files.
>
>I found charset set to iso-8859-2 in /root/Mail/.lang.
>I don't recall instructions to change this in README.  Might it be safer to
>set it to 8859-1 as default for the lucky majority of BL users who don't
>need to modify programs to use their charset and are not expecting to need
>to change it?

You should read and try to understand the .macro file that defines the
function keys F1...F10. F3 and F4 make it possible to change
keyboard, screen and encoding with one keystroke. If you want to
edit the encoding manually press F2. This key first edits .lang and
then reads the changed configuration data for the ongoing session.
.lang-cz and .lang-ru are only replacements of .lang, F3 and F4
copy them over the existing .lang in order to change the encoding.
You might do something similar with a western encoding .lang-en or
.lang-it.

>
>If I change to iso-8859-1 my .wav file is attached as 'quoted ISO-8859-1'
>instead of -2.  It still won't come out as music, will it?  What do I need
>to do to make mutt encode .wav and .ppm files as base64 in attachments?

RTFM

>In .muttrc you have editor set to e3pi for BL2.  I happen to have e3 on my
>computer but pico might be safer for the BL2 package.

I personally prefer the internal editor of mc (you can start it
mc -e). Midnight commander also is my main tool to view files of
all kinds. I probably will not waste energy to define every
extension again in mutt's mailcap file, but rather hand the files over
to mc (you can start directly into the viewer with mc -v, I think).

Of course mc should not be required in order to run the mutt
add-on. So we have to put some default settings to mailcap that
will run on _any_ BL1, BL2 or BL3 system. I had pico there, but than
realized that BL3 did not include pico any longer. But the e3 file
is so tiny that I included it into the mutt-bl2 add-on. So there is
compatibility, now.

>
>In both BL2 and BL3 .mailcap you have zgv as default image viewer and xv as
>an alternate.  BL3 does not have either of these but it does have xli. Could
>you puy xli and seejpeg instead in the BL3 .mailcap?  Seejpeg is in SW3.5.
>I suppose xli should be the default since it comes with BL3 tho it is not
>cli.

I will put only the defaults from BL there, probably the same
defaults Steven put into the links.cfg. I will fix this, soon.
May be mailcap could be more self-documenting.

>
>I see you have catdoc set up to view .doc files and links-0.90 for .html
>files.  I will have to remember to change that if I install links2 and
>delete links-0.90 (along with the line in alias for links).  Would it work
>to specify just 'links' since there is an alias for that already?

This is a problem with BL. The aliases are very useful on command
line, but they do not work in scripts. As I use different versions of
links in different BL systems I deleted the alias and use a
small script with the name links, instead, that calls the
correct version.

links2 would be the best viewer for html attachment if you run mutt
in X window (sorry, no colours, yet). In console the text links
is the better viewer. mailcap can be written in a way that
checks for the existence of X environment and calls links2 instead
of links.

>
>It is nice to see that catdoc will also read rtf and xls files.  I thought
>you needed a separate program for each of those.

catdoc does come with the separate program xls2cvs. The package
includes catdoc, xls2cvs, html2text. You should keep in mind, that
catdoc also converts rtf. You do not need a separate program fro rtf.

>
>Why do you have two ways specified for reading html?  Should one of them
>have an # in front of it so as not to confuse mutt, or does it just choose
>the first?

This is mutt's best feature: one line defines the XXX to
text converter for the pager. Another line defines an alternative
viewer that will be called after pressing v. There are even more
ptions. RTFM.

>
>
>My apologies if I somehow confused the two mail programs for BL2 and BL3 - I
>have mounted the BL3 partition to refer to it from BL2.

Known problem ;-)

>I have not tried Sylpheed as I prefer CLI if available.  Has that worked
>well for other users?

Sylpheed is a great program, but I have the impression that it
requires even more resources than Firebird. Steven's stripped-down
version is a wonder, but unfortunately will not work with any
internationalization.

>
>We are apparently not a gaming crowd.

I am not so sure. Already three years I am playing with BL. And still
do always all my work with DOS...

>I will try to test out these games
>some day but I really don't understand how to set up a network other than to
>just send/receive files and at least one is network based.  It will be
>educational.

Yes, that is the right word.

Christof

_______________________________________________

 Christof Lange <cce.zizkov AT volny.cz>
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