Pale Moon forum

Hello,

I seek to create a VBox virtual appliance that contains only Pale Moon & Thunderbird, not a general purpose Linux system.

I seek recommendations for the base Linux system. The only requirement is that it be lean, fast, and have those display libraries & drivers needed to support PM & TBird. Got any ideas what I should try?

Thanks for providing Pale Moon. I'm a supporter.

- Mark.

Why Thunderbird and not Interlink? Also for base system, something Red Hat based.

New Tobin Paradigm wrote: ↑

2019-10-09, 04:38

Why Thunderbird and not Interlink? Also for base system, something Red Hat based.

Hi Matt,

Interlink? Never heard of it. I'll have to look at it and see if it supports detached profiles & maildir.

Red Hat? You sure? Do they have a tiny distro?

Thanks,
Mark.

Hey Matt,

From some of the screen shots, I assume Interlink is your project (?)

I really have only 2 requirements:
1, Maildir store, and
2, Ability to put sent mail & received mail in the same folder on a per-account basis -- I can do this in TBird, but it's clumsy.

What say you?

I'd suggest you refrain from calling me by my first name.

markfilipak wrote: ↑

2019-10-09, 05:09

Hey Matt,

From some of the screen shots, I assume Interlink is your project (?)

I really have only 2 requirements:
1, Maildir store, and
2, Ability to put sent mail & received mail in the same folder on a per-account basis -- I can do this in TBird, but it's clumsy.

What say you?

Not sure about maildir, but I use Interlink for Gmail and another provider with IMAP - both accounts have their own separate folders for everything.

New Tobin Paradigm wrote: ↑

2019-10-09, 05:26

I'd suggest you refrain from calling me by my first name.

Okay. Well, I tried Fedora (Red Hat). It's the most click-happy OS I've seen. I browsed the whole thing. I couldn't find anything like Synaptic; I couldn't find a way to ditch Firefox and install PM. It's the Linux equivalent of WinVista.

markfilipak wrote: ↑

2019-10-09, 07:09

Okay. Well, I tried Fedora (Red Hat). It's the most click-happy OS I've seen. I browsed the whole thing. I couldn't find anything like Synaptic; I couldn't find a way to ditch Firefox and install PM. It's the Linux equivalent of WinVista.

You can still just extract PM from the tarball provided and set it up without a package manager. It will use its built in auto-updater.

moonbat wrote: ↑

2019-10-09, 05:29

... Not sure about maildir, but I use Interlink for Gmail and another provider with IMAP - both accounts have their own separate folders for everything.

There's 2 email storage schemes (that I know of): mbox & maildir.

Mbox stores account mail in one giant file per account with an auxiliary index file for individual message lookup. Mbox stores must periodlically be compacted. If the store gets corrupted, you're hosed. Off-line searches are very painful.

Maildir stores account mail in individual files under a directory per account, so no compacting & much lower possibility of corruption. Off-line searches via any file browser is a snap.

Do you have any idea which Interlink uses?

moonbat wrote: ↑

2019-10-09, 07:13

... You can still just extract PM from the tarball provided and set it up without a package manager. It will use its built in auto-updater.

Yeah. I tried to do the same with TBird and the fact that Mint's Cinnamon desktop is scripted rather than compiled really became apparent. Cinnamon locked up and just trashed.

markfilipak wrote: ↑

2019-10-09, 07:22

moonbat wrote: ↑

2019-10-09, 07:13

... You can still just extract PM from the tarball provided and set it up without a package manager. It will use its built in auto-updater.

Yeah. I tried to do the same with TBird and the fact that Mint's Cinnamon desktop is scripted rather than compiled really became apparent. Cinnamon locked up and just trashed.

Strange, I was on Cinnamon earlier and Xfce now - didn't face this with the extracted version of PM. Probably you shouldn't either, if you try. So are you looking at using Mint for the VM and Fedora for the host? I'd recommend Xfce over Cinnamon, it's more like a traditional desktop and much lighter on system resources.

Have you considered a puppy distro?

I've had good luck with Linux Mint, that's one of the most popular Linux distributions right now. It's leaner than Ubuntu or Debian, and I know it works with Pale Moon and Thunderbird because I know people on the forums have tried it, and I also used it for testing my code to make sure everything worked properly on Linux.

It's what I would pick if I want something that just works, isn't too specialized, and just does what you'd expect a Linux distribution to do without too much cruft.

https://linuxmint.com/about.php

If you're looking for something based on Red Hat, I've also heard good things about CentOS. It's supposedly a lot less of a mess than Fedora has become and is more closely based on the real Red Hat. I've never had good luck with Fedora at all, but RHEL and CentOS seem solid.

https://centos.org/about/

Manjaro has Palemoon in the repos? You could try that?

As already suggested, you could try Mint Xfce, or, I would suggest Mint Mate over that. But per your requirements of "lean and fast" I would really suggest Miyo Linux (it's based on Devuan) with the Openbox window manager:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/miyolinux/

You could also try the antiX base install and just install Pale Moon and TBird from their repos. It also has a nice remaster tool where you could install those on a Live session and then respin a custom ISO from there, if you need to do multiple installations.

Of course, most any Debian or Ubuntu release or derivative could also install PM from the OBS repo that I maintain...

My question, because I have let this thread go on long enough without asking... Is why Thunderbird and not some other e-mail client you may or may not know about

Yeah, Interlink for the win!

markfilipak wrote: ↑

2019-10-09, 04:32

The only requirement is that it be lean, fast, and have those display libraries & drivers needed to support PM & TBird. Got any ideas what I should try?
- Mark.

Gentoo or Funtoo. Warning- they take some work, not a click and go install.

EDIT: Use openbox for the GUI, it's basic and you only have two apps.

I'd recommend against Gentoo for a vappliance; LFS systems can't be thoroughly tested by us because they will be different for each system; it's better to use a mainstream binary release O.S. that has seen QA.