FC6

I installed FC6 on my friend's PC. He had been wanted to try out linux for a long time so when I came to visit him in Bilbao we sat down and I gave him a crash course in unix.

The things he was most impressed about:

1. OpenOffice (he really just need a nice way to make PDFs and presentations)
2. He could use skype (he calls home to Brazil a lot)
3. He could use all his other messengers
4. Lots of software he was already familiar with is open source (he just didn't know it)
   
5. It ran on his old computer extremely well and his hardware Just Worked(TM)
6. He could learn the basics in an afternoon.
   

He doesn't really have time to play around with all of the other open source software I installed and I obviously didn't teach him anything about the commandline or anything of that nature. He really just wanted a machine in his living room for his family and visitors to use and not have to be worried about viruses and endless maintenance. For those switching to linux from lesser operating environments the hard part is just picking a distro and getting it setup initially. Many users use so few programs that once everything is setup they are set for a few years.

mutt header caching

I was wondering why when I built mutt 1.5.13 I only noticed a slight performance boost over 1.4.x when headers were being loaded. I finally realized I never configured header caching!! Here are my newly revised compile time options:

./configure --enable-pop --enable-imap --with-gss --with-ssl --with-sasl --enable-hcache

From there it's just a matter of adding 'set header_cache=/path/to/cache' to your muttrc. Go ahead, try it out for yourself!

Getting mutt to autocomplete multiple email addresses

I have a query command specified in my muttrc. Basically it's perl script that searches the corporate ldap server. It works just fine whenever I type 'Q' from the pager and I can even type 'A' to append to the query. My problem is that I couldn't figure out how to select multiple entries. I googled for a while and the best thing out found was typing '^T' while entering text in the To: field. That allowed me to use my query command for sending emails to multiple people. My guess is that it will also work for any other fields as well.