xP is distributed with the permission of the University of Washington,
however, this does not imply endorsement by the University of Washington.

History / Screenshots / Licensing / Documentation / Downloads / Contact Us

( Summary )

xP provides an intuitive, high quality, graphical (X11) user interface to the University of Washington's PINE® Messaging System.  xP aims to provide an interface that is welcoming and easy to use for the new user, while still retaining the look, feel and key commands of PINE for the experienced user.
 

( History )

This is a project a long time coming.  It started with me trying to develop an X11 mailer called X-Dora (named for a former favorite e-mail client of mine).  ;-)  In any case, I got to using PINE, and it became my new favorite; although I missed the graphical interface.  So I broke out the old X-dora project and started making it "PINE-like."  Mind you, I haven't done great work in it lately -- damn college classes.  But I digress..

My goal is to make the program resemble PINE as closely as possible while making it intuitive and friendly for the new user.  This project IS NOT an attempt to replace PINE.  Rather it will consist of a series of patches to append to the PINE distribution.  This way, if you're at a graphical (X11) console, you can run xP, if you're at a text-only console, you can run PINE.  And the beauty is -- they're the SAME program!  Two programs in one mean that your mailboxes are always the same, your signatures are always the same, there is consistency in life!  Well kinda.. ;-)
 

( Screenshots )

I've recently picked up work on xP again. I've ported it to the new XClass toolkit (v0.5.3), and I'm working on integrating it with the new PINE source (v4.33). I still have a ways to go. Here are some screen shots.

New Shots

1. Main Screen
2. Message Index
3. Reading Mail
4. Compose Mail -- (read the message sent from xP)

( A Tale of Two Licenses )

It was the best of licenses, it was the worst of licenses..  :)  Just kidding..  But we are treading dangerous waters here, so be careful..

The House of Washington
The University of Washington owns PINE and is responsible for distributing and maintaining PINE.  They crafted a license for PINE which, in effect, states that developers are free to distribute their source changes to PINE as "diff" files which users can use to run the program "patch", to update their PINE distribution with the changes.  This of course implies that any attempt to distribute a modified source code to PINE is completely prohibited.

The House of Stallman
For the development of xP, I selected the XClass95 library by Hector Peraza.  Mr. Peraza was good enough to license his software under the GNU Library General Public License.  This is very good because it gives the XClass95 library enough flexibility so that I can modify it to suit my needs for xP, and it also allows other program to make calls to some of its functions without having to be licensed as GPL.

Solution
The xP project consists of several components:

1. The xP components are source files that I independently developed.  They have been carefully kept separate from any PINE files so as to insure that they don't get absorbed by the PINE license.  These files are all licensed LGPL.
2. Secondly, there are new files to PINE which reside with the PINE source.  These just made it easier for me to keep most of my changes away from the PINE core source files.  These files are also LGPL.
3. Finally, there are a few "diff" files which are used to modify the PINE distribution so that it will call xP when necessary.  Eventually, you need to get your hands dirty with PINE so xP can run -- otherwise xP is just dead code that expands the PINE binary size by 200k.  These "diff" files consist of my "changes to the PINE distribution."  These have to correspond to the PINE license.

( Documentation )

Please be sure to check the Sourceforge-xP web page for additional information and links to other parts of the xP project.

Also, be sure to read the FAQ for answers to all your favorite questions! :)

I have created a page which will contain xP design policies. Right now there are only two, but have no fear, I will write more when I grow tired of coding once again.. :)

And OF COURSE don't forget to check the University of Washington's Pine Information Center for news, reference, and information from THE Pine source.

( Downloads )

Please remember, this is a DEVELOPER'S VERSION of xP. It is not currently usable as an e-mail client. A stable version will be coming soon, but is NOT available yet. There is a GOOD chance this program will crash while you're running it.

I would HIGHLY RECOMMEND using the INSTALLER and not using the install directions.

The install directions are currently available online. You can view them here.

The installer is complete.  It has been statically built and compressed using gzexe.  It is only a binary.  You SHOULD NOT decompress this file. Simply download it and run it.  You DO NOT need to run it with root permissions, just make sure you have permissions to the directories you are trying to edit (or the parent directory if you are trying to create a directory).

Unfortunately, http doesn't download the permissions information along with the file. So after downloading you must either run the binary through a shell (i.e. sh xp-installer*) or you must set the executable permission (i.e. chmod a+x xp-installer*) and then run the binary.

 

	Installation Program	xP Version	Platform	Operating System
	xp-installer-0.3-linux.i386	0.0.15	Intel x86	Linux 2.2/2.4
	xp-installer-0.3-freebsd.i386	Coming Soon...	Intel x86	FreeBSD 2.2
	xp-installer-0.3-openbsd.i386	Coming Soon...	Intel x86	OpenBSD 2.8
	xp-installer-0.3-aix.rs6000	Coming Soon...	IBM RS/6000	IBM AIX 6.4
	xp-installer-0.3-solaris.usparc	Coming Soon...	Sun Ultrasparc	Sun Solaris 7
	xp-installer-0.3-irix.mips	Coming Soon...	MIPS	SGI IRIX 6
	xp-installer-0.3-osx.ppc	Coming Soon...	PowerPC	Apple Mac OS X

Please note that Linux is my primary development platform.  The other versions may require some additional libraries that do not ship on standard commercial Unix platforms.

Please make sure you have the following libraries installed:

Library	Minimum Version	Distribution Site
libXpm (xpm)	3.4j	ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/X11/contrib/libraries
gcc	2.95	ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gcc/

The installation binary retrieves the source code from an http server.
Older source code is kept on the ftp server.

( Contact Us )

If you have any questions about the project, or if you would like to help, you can drop me a line at omega@users.sourceforge.net.

If you would like to join the mailing list, you can subscribe here.

 

xP is hosted by the good people at VA Linux Systems and their sourceforge.net project.

© Copyright 1998-2001 by Brian Ecker.