Tao of Mac

Feb 24th 2009 · 2 min read · #.net #e-mail #howto #linux #mua #postbox #windows #wine

Postbox on WINE

A few days ago, being intrigued by , I gave it a whirl on my . This because I have gotten rather used to Xobni in , and I’ve been searching for something similar for home use.

The Related Mail plug-in is nice but doesn’t do most of what I want (that being getting more information on contacts and attachments) and , despite being brilliant and extensible in , hasn’t (yet) reached a point where it can do what I want (nor do I have the time to contribute to it these days), so I’m still looking.

But despite being nice and polished, I somehow didn’t find it compelling enough for me to switch from years of ~~abuse~~habit.

Still, that doesn’t mean that I can’t use it when I’m on something other than on the . (my usual alternative ) has an utterly asinine design that to no end, which is more annoying when you consider that it’s otherwise damn near perfect in terms of speed and features to run on a netbook.

is based on to a large extent, but compensates by (nearly) fixing many of the gripes I have with it, so I decided to give it a whirl on my .

Trouble is, I’m still running on it, and my patience for reinstalling the whole thing (even despite concerning ) is nil. And has no version.

So I decided to reinstall and have a go at it. Installing was a breeze, but it refused to run - and, to my surprise, it turned out to require 2.0 (and hence the latest bleeding-edge version of ).

Once I installed both1, however, it worked fine:

Postbox on WINE
Postbox on WINE

I have (as yet) found no real issues with it running in this way, although there is the usual visual flakiness associated with apps running under compiz (slow redraws and flickering animations on occasion)2.

Indexing and searching work (as does everything I’ve tried so far), and were it not for the fact that does not have a very clear roadmap, I would be very tempted to adopt it for regular use.

Let’s wait and see what comes of it. In any case, now you know you can try it out under and make up your own mind.

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]
"FontSmoothing"="2"
"FontSmoothingType"=dword:00000002
"FontSmoothingGamma"=dword:00000578
"FontSmoothingOrientation"=dword:00000001

  1. Mind you, the 2.0 runtime may appear not to install correctly. Mine complained, and yet it worked. ↩︎

  2. In case you’re wondering about the font smoothing (which goes a long way toward making it tolerable), it’s a new feature as of 1.1.3 (or so), and you can get it by importing this registry file with regedit: ↩︎