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Building Alpine on Hardy Heron

August 24th, 2008 Leave a comment Go to comments

Lately, I have developed a liking for the Alpine Messaging System. It is a text based email client that runs on a variety of platforms. I use it with Gmail IMAP at home and MS Exchange at work. In both cases, it works beautifully.

Pre-compiled binaries for a good number of platforms are available on the apline website. But if you are not in a position to use the pre-compiled binaries – say because you do not have root privileges, or binary is not available for your platform, or may be you just
want to use the bleeding edge development code – you can build the alpine application from source. The following steps are specific to building the latest SVN snapshot on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. It may/may not work on other OSes.

Prepare your system

Get all the (known) prerequisites. From my experience, these are required:

  • libncurses5-dev to get rid of the following error:

configure: error: Terminfo/termcap not found

  • libpam0g-dev and libssl-dev to get rid of some SSL related errors.

To get the above use the following in terminal:

  % sudo apt-get install subversion libncurses5-dev \
                         libpam0g-dev libssl-dev

Get the source code

Get the latest source snapshot. Following few steps are one time. After the initial snapshot is acquired with svn checkout, svn update can be used to update the source snapshot:

  % mkdir ..../alpine
  % cd ..../alpine
  % svn checkout \

https://svn.cac.washington.edu/public/alpine/snapshots/

Accept the certificate (permanently) if required.

Configure, compile and install

Now use the familiar configure, make, make install routine to build and install Alpine.

  % cd .../alpine/snapshots
  % svn update
  % ./configure --prefix=/opt/apps/alpine
                --with-local-password-cache-method
  % make
  % sudo make install

I was overly optimistic in using --with-local-password-cache-method. I was hoping that Alpine would store my account passwords in Gnome Keyring! It did not work quite like that. I need to enter my email passwords every time I start Alpine.

Other way to automate password entry is to use the --with-passfile configure option. But it is known to be unsafe.

Happy messaging!

EDIT: Trying to recompile alpine on Intrepid, I discovered that libssl-dev is also required.

Author: Mahesh Asolkar Tags: , ,

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  1. Soma Bulusu
    March 26th, 2009 at 09:22 | #1
    Reply | Quote

    Hi,

    I was wondering how you got it to work with Exchange. I was able to get it configured for GMAIL, but how are you using it with exchange? If possible, can you send me the .pinerc file without your sensitive information to my mail address?

    Thanks,
    Soma

    • Mahesh Asolkar
      March 26th, 2009 at 13:32 | #2
      Reply | Quote

      To work with Exchange, these settings in .pinerc, I think, are important:


      inbox-path={SERVER/tls/novalidate-cert/user=USER}inbox
      folder-collections="My Exchange Folders" {SERVER}Inbox/[*]

      I also have these, to map ‘Sent Items’, ‘Deleted Items’ and ‘Drafts’ folders:


      default-fcc={SERVER/tls/novalidate-cert/user=USER}Sent Items
      trash-folder={SERVER/tls/novalidate-cert/user=USER}Deleted Items
      postponed-folder={SERVER/tls/novalidate-cert/user=USER}Drafts

      In all the above, replace SERVER with your exchange server and USER with your username. Use the same server you use in Outlook (or your existing client). You can also get the server name from the Outlook Web Access under the Options->About section. It is called ‘Outlook Web Access host name’.

      Let me know if that works for you.

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