stupid newbie questions........ alsa , mail

[Paul Higgins]

Derick beat me to it with his advice re: alsamixer.  It certainly sounds like 
it hasn't been installed.  I did an "everything" install on my machine, so 
for me it's been there from the beginning.  Re: email, I thought that YDL 
came with a spam filter (spamassassin?).  Again, if you did less than a full 
install, it might not yet be on your system.  I use KMail and am happy with 
it.

Re: other email clients, you may already be aware that the Mozilla people 
stopped development on the Mozilla suite in order to focus on the stand-alone 
applications (Firefox browser and Thunderbird email).  So you might want to 
pick up at least the browser, as it looks like all the helpful plugins and 
extensions are now being written nearly exclusively for that application. 

Also, for managing packages, etc., yum is pretty decent, but I've really 
gotten spoiled by Debian (on my x86 work machine + my dual G4), which I have 
to say is probably the best distribution when it comes to this task.  Anyway, 
Synaptic (Debian's GUI-based package manager) is also available for YDL (from 
freshrpms, I believe).  I recently installed it and it appears to work OK.

-PRH

P.S  I should also correct an erroneous statement I made: the two distros that 
claim to still run on Old World machines are Debian and Mandriva (not 
Ubuntu).

On Tuesday 05 September 2006 11:20, Derick Centeno wrote:
> Hi Bear!
>
> Why not check if alsamixer is installed?  You can do:
>
> $whereis alsamixer
>
> If you have it, the YDL system will tell you.  If you don't you can have
> it installed via yum (depending on which version of YDL you are using).
>
> As far as email clients go, you may find Thunderbird very reliable and
> friendly.  Sylpheed and Sylpheed-claws are liked by some, but
> Thunderbird does all the right things in an easy to understand way.  It
> has the capacity to reference data from servers using Spamassassin, as
> well as utilize it's own spam filter within it's Junk filter.
>
> Derick.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> bear wrote:
> > Hey Paul, thanks for jumping right on that for me.
> > I have to say the Yellowdog family is a helpful bunch and I appreciate
> > it.
> >
> > 1. tried to do the alsamixer dance but....here is the result.
> >
> > [root at localhost bear]# alsamixer
> >
> > alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such device
> > [root at localhost bear]#
> >
> > surely there is a simple answer that is beyond my room temp. IQ...
> >
> > 2. best mail program?
> > tried kmail and evolution... no spam filter?
> > what is everyone doing for mail?
> >
> > Thanks for all your help, Barry