Day in, day out…

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.

Since its Alphas, I’ve been comparing font rendering in official Firefox 3.0 Linux builds and the ones I used to compile myself. Fonts in the official builds were, and still are, very crudely rendered. Upon reading a little, I learned that this difference is due to the use of different version of Cairo, a graphics library that Firefox uses under the hood.

Using --enable-system-cairo option when building Firefox greatly improves the look of fonts. I used to compile my own nightly builds using this option, hoping that the official builds will move to using that option too, before the final 3.0 release.

I just tried the final release and found that it still does not use --enable-system-cairo option, and the fonts are still not neat.

Thankfully, I also noticed that Ubuntu’s Firefox 3.0 – that got updated today as well, does use --enable-system-cairo option. Now I don’t have to compile my own builds. I wish I had noticed this the first time I installed Hardy – the Firefox 3.0 beta that came with it probably used system Cairo too. But I am glad I noticed this, better late than never.

Here are a couple of screenshots that illustrate the difference:

Click on the image to view full size – The one on top is the Ubuntu build, using --enable-system-cairo option. The one a the bottom is the official Firefox build, not using that option. Notice how the fonts in the Ubuntu build are so much better than the fonts in the official Firefox build

Now, go download Firefox 3.0 while it’s hot. You don’t get to set a world record everyday!

I was running Ubuntu Linux 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) on my desktop which had an ATI graphics card. There were a lot of driver related issues (fglrx driver). I tried different versions of the driver, even upgraded to the alpha version of Hardy Heron, to gain access to the new kernel. The issues persisted. Succumbing to the driver blues, I replaced the ATI card with an Nvidia card. I am so much happier now.

However, I have this:

Notice the glow instead of shadow

What should be window shadows are somehow a glowy halo!

It is good to know I am not the only one. There’s a bug on CompizFusion (OpenCompositing) website that tracks this issue.

There seems to be a general consensus that this is indeed related to the Nvidia Linux drivers.

Here’s what is known so far. Folks dealing with glowy shadows have following in common:

• Some flavor of Linux (Ubuntu, ArchLinux, …)
• Nvidia graphics card (Mostly the 8-series)
• Latest Nvidia driver (nvidia-glx-new version 169.09 in my case)
• CompizFusion with Window Decoration plugin
• Either Emerald or Gnome window decorator

If you are dealing with similar issue, and think can add useful bit of information to the discussion, drop a comment. Better yet, update the bug on CompizFusion (OpenCompositing).

While we are at it, is there a way of tracking bugs submitted to Nvidia (via nvidia-bug-report.sh)?