The basic parameters of my system are I have a Pentium75 with 24MB RAM, approx 6Gigs of HD space, a Matrox Millenium I graphics card, USR Sportster 56k modem, 4X cd-rom and 15 inch SVGA monitor. Unless I want to play games like Quake II this makes a very fast pleasant workstation.
The version of GNU/Linux I use is Slackware and I am at the stage of having a stable installation of version 3.3 as my default and a new version 3.4 installation under test (pretty much done actually).
I use Netcom for access to the Internet.
I found the information on using GNU/Linux from Netcom to be pitifully thin, in fact this is it as far as Netcom are concerned.
For local work I find Slackware pretty much perfect "out-of-the-box", apart from my X-Window setup (Millenium I /etc/XF86Config) but I had some work to do to connect to the Internet. What follows is my notes on what to do with a standard Slackware system to get reliable Internet access. I haven't got it perfect by any means so do let me know if you find any mistakes here!
The basic IP connection is provided by pppd as mentioned in this. Normally I connect to Netcom's 56k POP and leave the machine connected permanently. For this I've modified the Netcom ppp-on script a bit - here's my /usr/sbin/ppp-56k-forever. The persist instruction makes it reconnect when the connection is dropped. Remember to be absolutely certain you're not paying by the minute if you do this!
This script uses a chat script /etc/ppp/chat-netcom to establish the session with the ISP, although you'll have to supply your own username and password. This is a bit different to Netcom's recommended one - I took out anything I didn't understand until it worked!
The other relevant files you need to change on a 3.4 system for basic connectivity are /etc/ppp/options and /etc/resolv.conf
To send mail with a Netcom account you use SMTP, whereas to receive it you use POP3. Slackware provides sendmail for SMTP email, and fetchmail for POP3.
Slackware comes with a sendmail configuration that is almost but not quite correct for use with Netcom. The file in question is /usr/src/sendmail/cf/cf/linux.smtp.mc. I discovered that although I could send out email successfully, it wasn't correctly formatted and would often get bounced. My modified sendmail configuration is here : /usr/src/sendmail/cf/cf/linux.smtp.mc.chris but also check out the Stop Press section below.
I'm no sendmail expert but I found the genericstable feature would allow me translate between local usernames and valid from: addresses as far as the Internet was concerned, and the masquerade_envelope feature would make sure this happened in the mail headers so even Netcom couldn't screw things up.
The genericstable feature takes an input file /etc/genericstable and produces database files for sendmail with the command
# makemap hash /etc/genericstable < /etc/genericstable
You can't use GNU dbm databases with this version of sendmail (v.8.8.7) (which is what I used previously) because of some security problem to do with file-locking , but the hash database approach seems to be fine.
Finally to create the sendmail configuration, you use m4 just as instructed in the man page to create the sendmail configuration page :
m4 linux.smtp.mc.chris > /etc/sendmail.cfand then restart sendmail (or reboot) and you should be up and running properly with sendmail.
# "Smart" relay host (may be null) DSto read
# "Smart" relay host (may be null) DSsmtp.ix.netcom.comin /etc/sendmail.cf.
When I'm connected I like to have my mail arrive as soon as possible, so I use this /usr/sbin/getmail script. The superb manual page for fetchmail will let you decode this. Note it checks for mail every 60 seconds!
This script sets some of the parameters for fetchmail to operate, and others are set in /root/.fetchmailrc