alpine
UW recently release alpine, a free version of the Pine email program. Having used pine for most of my college career, I installed alpine on my laptop to play around with it and it brought back some fond memories. Then I decided to see if I could get it built for the n800.
Aside from having to setup scratchbox again, the build went fairly smoothly on the x86 target. It seemed to work ok, so I switched over to the armel target and tried it there. It consistently makes QEMU crap out at one point during the build, where it generates a help_context.c file from a helper binary that is built. This didn't seem overly important, so I just copied the file that was generated from the x86 build (since it's source code after all), and ran make again and I had a nice armel binary to try on the n800 itself. A quick scp over, and I had it up and running.
This is actually pretty cool. It's fairly responsive, processes the folders quickly, and with mouse emulation turned on, I don't even have to use the keyboard when I'm just reading mail. The only issue I have is that it seems to not like gmail's SSL certificate, and I can't get my inbox to be displayed. All the other folders work though. Oh well, I rarely get anything in my actual inbox that can't wait until I check email on a normal computer.
I might try hacking it a bit to add a way to flag messages as Read without actually reading them. I use this a lot in other clients, and I can't seem to figure out how to do it in alpine out of the box. Aside from that, everything works as-is.
For those interested in using the maemo stuff on a Fedora based distro, you'll need to disable the vDSO by doing:
echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/vdso_enabled
as root. For some reason, the scratchbox installation craps out with rtdl errors if the vDSO is enabled. I blame scratchbox, but I don't really have the energy to go figure out why and fix it.
Edit: It seems that you can do "Not New" for marked as Read in Alpine with no additional patches. Thanks to Seth Vidal for pointing that out. My mail reading habits have changed a lot since college and I never thought to try that :)
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jwboyer) wrote,
