Alpine E-mail client for the N800!
 

Pine is the University of Washington's Program for Internet News and Email. In 2006, UW ceased development on Pine and started development on a successor christened with the name of Alpine -- in reality, Alpine being Pine v5.0 but now under an Apache license.

There are both Unix and Windows versions of Alpine. The Unix version is text user interface based -- its message editor inspired the text editor Pico. The Windows (and formerly DOS) version is called PC-Alpine.

The Unix version runs very well on the Nokia Internet Tablet N800. With mouse-support enabled it can be be driven very nicely by point-and-click. With support from UW Alpine Development team, the current Alpine source now compiles cleanly on Scratchbox. A binary-only distribution can be downloaded from here.

http://home.mminternet.com/~delaroca/

If you are handy with an xterm, then configuring Alpine on the N800 is relatively straighforward. In return for the effort, one is rewarded with a no-nonsense E-mail client, fast, rich in features and fully standards compliant... Mark Crispin who invented IMAP twenty years ago is part of the UW Alpine Development team and is now running Alpine on his very own N800!

The current Alpine release, v0.99999, is a pre-release... but don't worry, as pre-releases go this is quite solid and many people use and depend on it for their daily E-mail processing. It shouldn't be long before the public v1.0 release. With the new Apache license, the open source community is welcome to get involved. For now, and if interested, please join the Alpine Discussion list, details here:

http://www.washington.edu/alpine

The Usenet News group comp.mail.pine features coverage of Pine / Alpine issues as well. Alpine, by the way is also a capable Usenet News Reader.

Enjoy,

-- Denis

P.S. I have been able to confirm that these Alpine binaries run ok on the n770 with IT OS 2006.

Re: Alpine E-mail client for the N800!
 

I just tried the alpine 1.0 distribution for OS2007 from washington.edu on my brand new N810. I was an happy user of Pine on my former 770.
Problem is that invocation (I invoke it with -p because I have my config on the IMAP server, a VERY nice plus of (al)pine) fails with "Terminal type "xterm" is unknown". EXPORTING another term type fails with the same error.
.pine-debug contains no useful information. Config is correctly read from the server, last row says: "about to end_tty_driver".
I somewhat remember that on 770 (OS2006) I had to install bash to run around a similar problem... I cannot find bash on OS2008 (in "Red Pill" there is a bash that claims "no install because conflicts with busybox")...
Any help/hint is appreciated... Modest is promising and Claws-Mail can be used (and I use it) but the lightness and velocity of (al)pine is a definite plus...
Is anyone using it on OS2008?
TIA!

Re: Alpine E-mail client for the N800!
 

I'm not using it, but from that error it sounds like you might need ncurses-base installed:

http://repository.maemo.org/pool/mae....osso1_all.deb

Re: Alpine E-mail client for the N800!
 

RESOLVED. Sorry, I was looking for a solution and I, finally, found on http://home.mminternet.com/~delaroca/ that I had to install ncurses-base to have termcap entries.
Now alpine works perfectly.
So I can confirm alpine 1.0 runs on OS2008 on an N810 (just in case this is useful).
Many, many tx to the people that compiled the beast (and to the people doing it). :-)

Re: Alpine E-mail client for the N800!
 

Everything's working great (OS2008 N800) per your instructions other than the part about toggling the mouse for clicking/copying. Sending ^\ to pine (alpine) doesn't appear to do anything.


Slightly related, with the application catalog

Maemo Chinook
http://repository.maemo.org/
chinook
free non-free

apt-get install nano
from the command-line will install libncurses.

Re: Alpine E-mail client for the N800!
 

Looks like the ~delaroca page is gone. However, the IT version of Alpine can be found on the washington.edu pages. You'll need to have a way to unzip/untar the file. If you're trying to install a terminal-only e-mail client, I doubt this will be a problem for you ;)

http://www.washington.edu/alpine/acquire/

taylork: Does adding an XTerm shortcut "<ctrl>m" and then using it to toggle mouse control work for you?

Re: Alpine E-mail client for the N800!
 

I receive the message:
"[No selected item displayed -- Use NextPage to bring choice int]"

It looks like the ~delaroca page is back up.

Re: Alpine E-mail client for the N800!
 

Could I get some help installing Alpine? I'm stuck on the installation of ncurses-base.

I tried using the link moonshine gave to a version at repository.maemo.org, but when I attempt to install that package on my N180 I receive an error message from the Application manager that says:

"Unable to install ncurses-base. Incompatible application package."

Perhaps this means I am missing another package that ncurses needs? Where could I find out what that is?

Re: Alpine E-mail client for the N800!
 

I have the same issue with ncurses-base.
Any suggestion?
I am running Diablo on N810.

Re: Alpine E-mail client for the N800!
 

The page is still active,

http://home.mminternet.com/~delaroca


An Alpine binary with LDAP support is now available.

--denis

Re: Alpine E-mail client for the N800!
 

I ended up using apt-get install to install wget,
use wget to download the ncurses-base deb
and use dpkg to install the deb.