Why GNU/Linux Rocks

[shikitohno]

I'd recommend giving Arch a go on a normal machine first, unless the Raspberry Pi people provide an install image specifically made for them. Just a basic Arch install can be a bit intense if you haven't done anything like it before. It becomes much worse when you're trying to do largely unsupported features, like install to ARM and have everything work the same way. Technically there is an ARM version of Arch, but it's under-developed compared to i686 or x86_64 versions, and likely won't have many of the drivers needed for the Raspberry Pi's hardware without resorting to some clever moves.

Edit: And for the record, it was the size of your hard drive causing the issues, not your graphics card.

[devilock76]

See the thing is for the same price I can get a new battery for a netbook I have that won't hold a charge.

Ken

[sgreger1]

Edit: And for the record, it was the size of your hard drive causing the issues, not your graphics card.

Well we spent a lot of the time undoing the damage done by me having downloaded certain drivers and that one desktop (compiz orsomething), but yah the hard drive size was ultimately the issue that led to me switching to Fedora. So stupid that one of the most widely used distros is so behind so as to make it near impossible to make it work with 3TB of disk space.

[sgreger1]

I'd recommend giving Arch a go on a normal machine first, unless the Raspberry Pi people provide an install image specifically made for them. Just a basic Arch install can be a bit intense if you haven't done anything like it before. It becomes much worse when you're trying to do largely unsupported features, like install to ARM and have everything work the same way. Technically there is an ARM version of Arch, but it's under-developed compared to i686 or x86_64 versions, and likely won't have many of the drivers needed for the Raspberry Pi's hardware without resorting to some clever moves.

Edit: And for the record, it was the size of your hard drive causing the issues, not your graphics card.

Okay maybe I will stick with Fedora ARM than since I have at some some experience with that.

What is the best mail client in your opinion? I am about to set one up for all my email addys and was wondering if I should just use the default one (Evolution).

[shikitohno]

If you read up on distros beforehand, it was fairly predictable, actually. Ubuntu is not known for being the fastest updated distro. It's relatively stable, and even a monkey could do it, but you'd do well to look elsewhere if you want all the latest bells and whistles. For a technically inclined user who absolutely had to use Ubuntu for some reason, it's also pretty easy to work around. If you want to run the latest hardware and have all the newest toys though, you need a more bleeding edge distro like Fedora or Arch. The caveat with this is of course, if you're using one of these distros there is the potential for a less stable system, and you're expected to be technically competent enough to either work around it yourself, or be able to submit quality bug reports so that those smarter than yourself have solid info to work on when they try and fix it.

Fedora is the more hands free of the two I mentioned, but every once in a while, they'll throw you a curve ball out of the blue, and you'll have fun trying to fix it. I've only had one instance of my system being really unstable with Arch that wasn't self-inflicted, but Arch is a bit more work.

For mail, you ought to know by now I'm going to recommend something CLI-based. Personally, I prefer using mutt. I use it in combination with fetchmail and procmail. There's another config file I'm forgetting, but there's a decent guide covering it all here. If you go this route, remember that you replace the john in the .procmailrc with your username on your computer, rather than any email account name. This will show you how to set it up to working nicely with html emails, as well. I set up fetchmail to run every 5 minutes with cron, so it automatically checks my mail accounts every five minutes, and updates my mail box. I've also got mutt set to sort everything by threads.

[lxskllr]

Here's the distro of the week. I was looking for something light to put on an old computer for someone else, and I dig it myself. I may replace Ubuntu on my netbook with this. It's based on Debian stable, and uses the same repos. It comes with OpenBox, and Awesome as window managers, though you can install anything you want. It's a good lightweight distro for low end machines, but still looks good, and with Debians repos, has access to almost any software.

So, I present Zenix...

http://zenix-os.net/index.html

[sgreger1]

For mail, you ought to know by now I'm going to recommend something CLI-based. Personally, I prefer using mutt. I use it in combination with fetchmail and procmail. There's another config file I'm forgetting, but there's a decent guide covering it all here. If you go this route, remember that you replace the john in the .procmailrc with your username on your computer, rather than any email account name. This will show you how to set it up to working nicely with html emails, as well. I set up fetchmail to run every 5 minutes with cron, so it automatically checks my mail accounts every five minutes, and updates my mail box. I've also got mutt set to sort everything by threads.

You use a CLI based mail client.... Jesus ****ing christ man, hipster to the max eh? You browse snuson with elinks too?

Is there any advantage to a CLI based email client? So far I am learning to do everything from CLI, I launch every program from CLI and do everything in screen, I am trying to learn to be as completely non-dependant on the GUI as possible, but for god's sake man email is meant to be used in a GUI. I am going to try it just to see what it's like to live in Shiki's world.

[shikitohno]

Typically I use uzbl as my browser of choice, though I'm in Firefox at the moment. I find email to be largely unaffected by by not having any graphics. You miss the pictures, but email is inherently a text-based medium, so the important stuff should be conveyed adequately in the text. If I feel compelled to see the pictures, I can always choose to open the relevant links.

Oh, sgreger, if you'd really like to see what my mail client setup is like, make sure to set your editor in your .muttrc to either vi or vim. I use vim, and I think Fedora comes with it installed by default, but you may have to install it yourself. If you've been using nano for any command line text editing, have fun with your first vim session.

Zenix looks like it could be interesting. I'd probably swap out awesome for i3, but no big hassle. Of course, it's an entirely different matter whether the i3 status bar will actually work properly. It's pretty much broken in Ubuntu for some reason.

[sgreger1]

Typically I use uzbl as my browser of choice, though I'm in Firefox at the moment. I find email to be largely unaffected by by not having any graphics. You miss the pictures, but email is inherently a text-based medium, so the important stuff should be conveyed adequately in the text. If I feel compelled to see the pictures, I can always choose to open the relevant links.

Oh, sgreger, if you'd really like to see what my mail client setup is like, make sure to set your editor in your .muttrc to either vi or vim. I use vim, and I think Fedora comes with it installed by default, but you may have to install it yourself. If you've been using nano for any command line text editing, have fun with your first vim session.

Zenix looks like it could be interesting. I'd probably swap out awesome for i3, but no big hassle. Of course, it's an entirely different matter whether the i3 status bar will actually work properly. It's pretty much broken in Ubuntu for some reason.

How am I to view copious amount of cat pictures that are forwarded to me each day in a CLI client though? Lol.


My problem now is that I am using Thunderbird, which is great, but I can only use one email profile at a time. It has an addon called SmtpSelect, but I can't get it to work for some reason. I just need a mail client than can handle 4 emails from Smtp & Pop servers.

[shikitohno]

Mutt can handle multiple servers/accounts. You just need to do a bit extra with your config files. Googling "mutt email multiple accounts" should turn up relevant results. As I recall, you just need mutt to read a separate fetchmail file for each of the accounts, with each having a unique name.

[devilock76]

For email I use evolution. Works well for me most days. I have used mutt in the past and it is nice but most days it is just more simple one stop shopping to use evolution.

Ken

[lxskllr]

Thunderbird handles multiple accounts. I know it does 3 accounts, and I suspect it's unlimited. Evolution's alright. I tried to like it, but it had some peculiarities that irritated me. Thunderbird is cross platform. There's no reason you couldn't take the mail you received in Linux, and drop it into a Windows machine running Tbird. That kind of flexibility's valuable.

[devilock76]

Thunderbird handles multiple accounts. I know it does 3 accounts, and I suspect it's unlimited. Evolution's alright. I tried to like it, but it had some peculiarities that irritated me. Thunderbird is cross platform. There's no reason you couldn't take the mail you received in Linux, and drop it into a Windows machine running Tbird. That kind of flexibility's valuable.

Evolution is not perfect, but I like it for the logical keyboard shortcuts, many options, and how well all of its PIM features can't be integrated into Gmail, which is the primary service through which I handle all my email.

Ken

[devilock76]

Here's the distro of the week. I was looking for something light to put on an old computer for someone else, and I dig it myself. I may replace Ubuntu on my netbook with this. It's based on Debian stable, and uses the same repos. It comes with OpenBox, and Awesome as window managers, though you can install anything you want. It's a good lightweight distro for low end machines, but still looks good, and with Debians repos, has access to almost any software.

So, I present Zenix...

http://zenix-os.net/index.html

The distro of the week thing is why ended up going to arch. And granted that points more to a flaw in me than anything else. If you want a distro to cross as many ways of usage as possible you might as well roll your own. In that way there are only a couple of distros that really hit the mark for being able to start with the basics and build up to a full system.

1. Debian of course
2. Slackware
3. Arch
4. The BSD's
5. Roll your own

In the end I opted for Arch for all non server duties and BSD for all server based duties. Either of which I can do as thin and light installs, or super loaded up workstations.

My big+ mark for Arch was simply that the kernel is very bleeding edge and allows me to use kernel optimizations to do low latency music with a basically stock kernel and not needing to implement a real time kernel as I most likely would in Fedora or Ubuntu.

In fact one of my "project" ideas with a RaspberryPi is to build a portable synthesizer platform based on the board. I will do that with Arch when the time comes. Of course it will be the real trick to see what audio software can and will compile on the ARM architecture with Arch.

Ken

[lxskllr]

The distro of the week thing is why ended up going to arch. And granted that points more to a flaw in me than anything else. If you want a distro to cross as many ways of usage as possible you might as well roll your own. In that way there are only a couple of distros that really hit the mark for being able to start with the basics and build up to a full system.

I pretty much stick with Debian, and Debian based distros. I've considered Arch. I dismissed it before due to lack of package signing, but now that they have that going, I might give it a try. Probably not though. I don't see much point in making things harder than they have to be.