Luxembourg, Apr. 6th, 2006

Today some handy applications for Mail, News & WWW/FTP

elm 2.5.8
metamail 2.7
tin 1.4pre (19990927)
lynx 2.7.1
wget 1.5.3
ncftp 2.4.3

Extracts into /opt/network, about 4 MB space needed.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to supply more recent versions of
the programs:

- elm+ME works theoretically, but redrawing the screen took ages, so I
  stuck with 2.5.8, which is, if not fast, at least usable and it's
  Y2k compliant as well.
- metamail got only minor updates for Linux after 2.7
- tin 1.4+ refuses to work properly on old BSDs because it doesn't manage
  to detect the exit code of the editor properly (not only SunOS, at least
  FreeBSD 2.x suffers from the same problem), so I took the least buggy
  prerelease before 1.4. It's not the fastest one, but it works. According
  to the developers on the tin-Mailinglist, the problem is known for some
  years already, but they refuse to make a patch because "there isn't
  enough interest for running recent versions of tin on such old systems"
- lynx 2.8.x dumps core when rendering a page. A pity, because 2.7.1
  doesn't support SSL. Then again, 2.7.1 works fine and speed is ok.
- wget 1.5.3 works and runs fast, newer versions are too sluggish.
  Unfortunately, 1.5.3 has some problems with HTTP redirects
- ncftp 2.4.3 sometimes dumps core when entering ^C several times
  but works ok otherwise for most of the time.
  It's a known problem, nothing to blame SunOS about. Version 3 is too
  slow on a Sun3.



Usual disclaimers apply. I'm not going to be responsible if one of the
packages screws up your machine. Keep in mind this is done at my spare
time. The packages work for me and my machine. If you encounter any
problems, just drop me a mail but don't expect things to be fixed in a
day (if at all).



Have a nice day!

Martin Etteldorf  - etteldor@gmail.com