Alpine is a great text mode email application

I have used pine as my main email application since 1993 and I'm not even considering to replace pine with a more modern email application as long as pine is available in the Unix system where I read my email. When I need to read email that has been sent to some of my private email accounts
(like the one I use for this blog) I most often use alpine installed on my Linux box.

Alpine is a rewrite of the original pine. Unlike pine it uses an Apache license that allows redistribution of modified versions of the application which makes it more acceptable for free software enthusiasts.



Alpine uses a simple menu interface for composing and viewing email messges. For writing a mail, it uses the extremely newbie friendly editor pico that can of course be used also as a standalone editor for editing any text files you might like to edit. From the main menu of Alpine one can enter the simple to use setup dialogues, where one can set many options including the signature, printer, non-default address books, rules for automativally filtering the messages in different folders, set the screen colors, and a lot more.

Most probably you receive your email not directly in your box but instead use a mail account provided by your ISP or for example Google. In fact, it is quite simple to configure Alpine to read and send email using a Gmail account like I have done for reading the lwlinux account I use for receiving mail about this blog.

If you want to use Alpine with Gmail, go first to the setup menu. Then select Config. In the next screenshot you will see how the settings for Gmail are done, only a few lines must be configured.



If you have never used a text mode email application you should at least give alpine a chance. It is easy to use and configure and a lot easier to use than most of the graphical email applications. You will soon realize how easy it is to read and write emails when you don't have to move your hand all the time between the keyboard and the mouse.

See also my previous articles about text mode Linux applications:
Burn CDs and DVDs with cdw | Remind is a lightweight tool for reminders | Lightest WWW browsers for Linux | Manage your contacts with abook

Manage your contacts with abook

I'm constantly looking for applications that can comfortably be used even with an old computer. Some days ago, I posted an article about lightweight personal organizer OSMO. Now I have found something even more lightweight!

My new address book manager is abook. It is a simple text mode organizer for storing contact information. It has a simple to use user interface (using ncurses) and does not force the users to remember obscure CTRL sequences or vi-like keyboard shortcuts. On the contrary, the keyboard shortcuts are few and they can be seen on the top of the screen.

Abook utilizes a simple card view for the contacts. The contact information is divided on five tabs where address, phone, other information and custom information have been dedicated a tab. Abook can be used as a standalone application or it can be used as the addressbook for mutt email application.



It is possible to import and export contact information using the command line option --convert. Abook can convert the the contact information from the following formats:

• ldif
• mutt
• pine
• csv
• palmcsv

The following output formats are supported:

• abook
• ldif
• mutt
• html
• pine
• gcrd
• csv
• palmcsv
• elm
• text
• spruce
• wl

All the contacts are of course stored in a plain text file (default: ~/.abook/addressbook) that has an easy to understand format.

Manage your files with mc (Midnight Commander)

Once upon a time, there was a operating system called MS-DOS. It was a pretty limited system and awkard to use, but at the same time, it was a lot more useful than the graphical systems built on the DOS. To help the users, many companies created proprietary software that was sold to the end-users.

One of the most popular applications was Norton Commander or simply nc. The first version 1.0 was released as early as in 1986 [1]. This application set the standards for file managers for a long time. In fact, many file managers even today follow the concept of showing files simultaneously in two panels.

In addition to GUI file managers, the command line junkies can use the Midnight Commander, mc. It is available for probably every possible distribution in use. If you like to use Linux on an old computer, you might well try this application that does not steal all the resources of your old computer.



Midnight Commander provides all the usual functionality one expects from a file manager. With it, it is possible to copy, delete, archive, view and edit files or, for example, view man pages, It might not handle everything konqueror handles, but it does well what it is intended to do.

See also: Burn CDs and DVDs with cdw | Remind is a lightweight tool for reminders | Lightest WWW browsers for Linux

Finally on top of the search

After more than six months of blogging, Lightweight Linux is finally the first site in Google search results for "Lightweight Linux".

Champagne for everyone!

Edited: now down to the second place :-(

Burn CDs and DVDs with cdw

There are several useful applications available for burning CDs and DVDs on a Linux system. The geekiest users are probably happy with command line tools while most users are happy with k3b or gnomebaker.

Cdw is a ncurses based alternative to more famous tools. As a ncurses application it can be used on system with no X installed but as it has a menu based user interface it might be easier to use than the command line tools. In fact, cdw is just a frontend for cdrecord/wodim (for blanking CD-RW discs, writing data to single- or multi-session CD disc and single-session DVD discs) and mkisofs/genisoimage (for creating ISO images from selected files).



If you -- like me -- have difficulties in remembering the options of different CLI tools, you might like to try this small application. It is available at least in the repositories of Ubuntu and Debian testing (but not yet in the stable release).

If it is not included in your distribution's repositories, you can always get the source from the Sourceforge.

See also previous articles on text mode applications!

Use xosd for on-screen messages

The package xosd-bin provides Linux hackers a way to show messages on X screen. In itself this might not be very useful but the functionality can easily be included in scripts.

After installing xosd-bin the you can use osd_cat to show text on-screen. This is done by sending text over a pipe to osd_cat.

The simplest way to use osd_cat would be:

echo "Hello World!" | osd_cat

If you try this you might not even notice the small output on the top left corner of your screen. But the following gives an output that can barely stay unnoticed:

echo "Testing xosd using different fonts" | osd_cat -p middle -A center -d 5 -s 3 -c blue -f "-adobe-helvetica-*-*-*-*-34-240-*-*-p-*-*-*"

As you see, osd_cat understands many options. In the example, the output is shown at the middle of the screen centered for a period of five seconds with a shadow of three pixels. The color is blue and the font is defined by the rest of the line (use xfontsel for selecting the font).

Now that I have installed xosd I have to think about some cool use for it! Maybe it could be used in a script that checks my email account or to show on-screen reminders.

Any other ideas?

Still using antiX

I've been too lazy to blog during the last week or maybe just too busy with my studies. Either way, I'm still using antiX as my desktop system and I've been completely happy with this prerelease version.

I have not installed a lot of extra packages as I have mostly been able to get things done with the default installation and some extras like Emacs. As I've used both Debian and Ubuntu earlier, I am very much at home with antiX.

Two weeks ago I thought I would just test antiX and then install something more useful. At the moment I think I'll continue to use this distro installed much longer than I would have imagined. I see no technical reasons for installing yet another distro.

But in order to have something to write about in this blog, I'll tomorrow install DeLi on an even older computer. It will be interesting to see how much the distro has developed with the latest release.