kousik samanta's Profile

The next step is the dreaded configuration of sendmail. Unless I’m very much mistaken, sendmail is already on your Leopard system (it was already there for me - though I’m blonde, so it might be there because I installed it at some point in the mist-shrouded past of a month ago and subsequently forgot), so you don’t have to install it. But you do have to get it to do what you want, and as with anything this can be a bit tricky…

…which is why I don’t bother. There’s also this bit of black magic called putmail.py - as the name implies, a Python MTA. Actually a fairly minimalist one: it’s tailored to people like me who need to send mail, but not do anything fancy - just username, password, send, thank you very much. And that’s what it does for smtp. Installing it and setting it up is the easiest thing in the world - just read the helpful man page and it’ll take you 5min. tops. The config file goes in ~/.putmail/putmailrc. Here’s mine:



[config]

server = smtp.server.name

email = my_email_username@domain.name

username = my_email_username

password = my_password

tls = yes



(The last line is necessary to get it to go through IU.)

Now we have the ability to send mail and read it, but we’ve still gotta actually get some mail to read.

The standard thing to do here is use fetchmail - but I feel the same way about that I feel about sendmail: too much trouble so long as there’s Getmail in the world. The link goes to the latest platform-neutral version unixy version. Getmail has the same basic advantage that putmail.py does: it’s written in Python, so it installs easily and works out of the box whereever a cool enough (read: >2.3 at the time of writing) version of Python is installed:



tar xvzf getmail-4.8.4.tar.gz

cd getmail-4.8.4

python setup.py build

python setup.py install



DONE! Well, except for the configuration. Configuration files go in ~/.getmail/getmailrc. Like with putmail.py, it’s all so simple there’s little point in walking anyone through it - but for reference here’s my file for talking to my Gmail account:



[retriever]

type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever

server = imap.gmail.com

username = my_username

password = my_password

mailboxes = (”INBOX”, )

[destination]

type = Mboxrd

path = ~/Mail/inbox

[options]

read_all = false

Step 1: First you need to remove the new and crappy version
of X11. I did this with the following commands in the terminal:

sudo mv /usr/X11 /tmp/
sudo rm /System/Library/LaunchAgents/org.x.X11.plist
sudo rm /Library/Receipts/X11User.pkg
sudo pkgutil --forget com.apple.pkg.X11User                   # UPDATE [2007/10/29]: I forgot to include this in the original steps.

Note: X11User.pkg may not exist in /Library/Receipts. That's OK.

Step 2: Install Tiger's X11.app. If you have your Mac's
installer CDs, the package you need to double-click the file
X11User.pkg found inside System/Installation/Packages/ on the
installer CD.

Note: There are lots of versions of X11.app for Tiger. The
original Tiger CD ships with one that was PPC only, which I
accidentally installed when I did this the first time. If you have a
recent Installer CD that came with your mac, I would use that.
Otherwise, it appears you can download it here,
but I haven't tried that.

Step 3: The final step is to edit the file
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc and go to the bottom of the file and replace
"exec quartz-wm" with "exec /usr/X11R6/bin/quartz-wm".

That's it! Now X11.app doesn't suck as bad anymore.

The applications should be run from the Finder, you can find them in /Applications/KDE4.

Sometimes, Installer.app fails to run the post-install. If things are acting funny, try running these two commands in a terminal:

launchctl load /Library/LaunchAgents/org.freedesktop.dbus-session.plist

/opt/local/bin/kbuildsycoca4

...and see if your application starts.