* william windels william.windels@telenet.be [20060219 22:45]:
I am new on the grml distribution but I work already 2 years with linux. I am completely blind and I use brltty as screenreader.
1: at the moment I have running the grml distribution 0.6 with mutt 1.5.11 , sendmail, procmail and postfix as mta.
Before , I was working with exim (version 3) as mta on a other distribution.
Is it not possible to configure mutt to work alone for the following things:
- send and receive mail (without external mta)
- sort the mail in different mailboxes conform the filters?
- each user with his own <;muttrc-file?
For example, you can do this with outlook express on ms windows: to send and receive mail, you need only your login with pasword from your provider to receive your mail and the smtp-server from the provider. You can also create filters to sort the incomming mails. But, I love linux much more than windows :)
First of all take a look at grml-mutt or grml-muttng to configure some basics of mutt or mutt-ng. (Backup your ~/.muttrc first to make sure you don't overwrite anything.)
To send mail take a look at msmtp, a sample configuration file is shipped with grml: ~/.msmtprc
Filter your mail using procmail. Take a look at
http://michael-prokop.at/computer/config/.procmailrc http://michael-prokop.at/computer/config/.procmail/sort-rc
to get an idea how to use it.
2: perhaps it should be a good idea to add some new function(s) to the user-configuration:
- a way to create new users
Just run 'adduser mynewuser'.
for root:
- a way to update the security packages available
Take a look at debsecan. It requires some scripting work to get only security related packages in Debian unstable, that's difficult by design.
- perhaps a way to (re)compile the kernel on a user-friendly based system?
Don't compile the kernel on your own unless you have a *really* good reason to do that. That's the work of the distributor, not really an end-user task with kernel 2.6.
Anyway, getting kernel sources and using 'make menuconfig' *is* user-friendly. :) Also take a look at make-kpkg.
3: mounting devices automatically from fstab: As Michael prokop said already , I can not change mountpoints of found devices during hd_install. This is explained with the following lines:
# Warning! Please do *not* change any lines below #because they are auto-generated by rebuildfstab!
How can I simply change mount-points of found devices so that they are automatically mounted in the new mountpoints after next reboot?
If I do rebuildfstab after changing the mountpoints , I receive no message but the devices are not launched automatically.
As the manpage of rebuildfstab says:
rebuildfstab uses the tool scanpartition to scan for devices located in /dev and adds entries for devices / partitions which are not available in /etc/fstab yet.
It does not mount any partitions automatically. If you want to use /dev/hda2 as your home partition, take the entry for /dev/hda2 from /etc/fstab and move it to the top of the /etc/fstab. *Everything* below the "warning-line" will be deleted by next run of rebuildfstab. If you don't want the rebuildfstab feature set CONFIG_FSTAB='no' in /etc/grml/autoconfig.
Example how to use /dev/hda2 with filesystem ext3 as /home would be:
/dev/hda2 /home ext3 defaults 0 0
4: text-packages: Is it not possible to add a configuration-option to the hd_install so that only text-related packages are installed?
No chance, as the installation is nothing else than copying the whole system to the disk and do some other adjustments.
Perhaps, the packages could be stored in 2 compressed parts on the cd: one for the consolestuff and one for the x-windows system.
Sorry, that's not an option for me. Just run 'apt-get remove xserver-xorg' to remove the X-window system on your installation. Catching the other x-related stuff should be possible via using the magic of debtags.
regards, -mika-