[SEL] Curious

[Glen Harris]

bill at antique-engines.com wrote:
 > What do the list's Linux users use for email, etc?
 > I may switch rather than go to Vista (uugghh)

Depending on which machine I'm on and what I want to do, I use Seamonkey as my 
all-in-one browser/email client, or Firefox/Thunderbird when I want slightly 
more modern single purpose apps. I do most of my work in an xterm, but I don't 
use a terminal based mail reader any more - I rarely find myself without a GUI 
these days, and on the those occasions I just grep ^Subject: ~/Maildir/new/* 
for things to less. Back in the day, I used nn for news.

I run my own IMAP server, not POP, which means that I can jump between 
different clients on different hosts and not lose messages. Oh, and filters 
are set up on the server, so client configuration is kept to a minimum.

Now that GMail is offering IMAP access, I'm recommending that as a long-term 
email hosting solution to my users. You get the best of all worlds, as they 
give you over 6Gb of email storage, you can read your mail from any browser if 
you're on the road and your IMAP client can be told to download local copies 
of some or all folders so you can still read your old messages when you're 
offline.

As to switching, I recommend Kubuntu. You can run it from the CDROM without 
installing on your hard disk, and even tell it to store your settings on a 
file in your windows disk so you can use it for a while and not start from 
scratch every time you boot up. Running from the CDROM is a little slower than 
running from hard disk, but once programs are loaded into memory, it's full 
speed. The reason I recommend Kubuntu rather than Ubuntu is that the KDE 
interface is much, much more familiar than Gnome for someone coming from a 
Windows GUI.

You can download a CD image to burn by going to http://www.kubuntu.org and 
navigating to a download mirror close to you. The file most people want is 
kubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.iso

As to running windows-only applications, I have a VMWare image which I boot up 
if I ever need to run anything. The last time I needed it was about 6 months 
ago to run the firmware uploader for my old ebook reader...

glen.