I attempted to put Mandrake 10.1 community Ed. on a disk the other night (just to see).
Imagine that I have a brand new computer. Onto this machine I put Linux using a main stream distribution RedHat, Mandrake or suchlike. This box is to be used at home, and will be connected to the isp for a few minutes four or five times a week to send and receive e-mail, and sometimes for a little longer to browse the web.
What do I need to do to achieve such a set-up? The mandrake distribution was useless for this! It offered to setup ISPs for every country but my own and crashed when I lied.
I need some official way to connect to the isp and log in. I use wvdial on RedHat 9, but that only comes on the full set of CDs for 'drake. Some program to fetch the mail from the isp. (eg. fetchmail?) Something to read it and write replies. (I use pine!) A way of sending the mail when the box is connected, and a way of storing mail until the box is connected. Maybe something to kill spam. A web browser.
As an ordinary user, I don't want to know about LANs, WANs, dial-on-demand, gateways, routers etc. unless such information is needed for such a basic set-up.
I do have (or can get) two nameservers xx.xx.xx.xx and yy.yy.yy.yy, the phone number of the ISP (0845 xxxxxx), a username, and a password.
This is the problem that an ordinary home user faces, when moving over to Linux, and I would be interested in the views of other subscribers to ALUG on suitable programs and their configuration.
Leon Stedman.