System requirements
===================

Mutt needs MiNT to run.  If you want to use the PGP interface you 
need MiNT with a non-blocking fork (at least version 1.12.5), otherwise 
your system will hang.  

Mutt is an MUA (mail user agent) not an MTA (mail transfer agent).  This
means that Mutt cannot transport mail on it's own behalf but needs an
external program for this.  This program is typically /usr/sbin/sendmail.
That doesn't mean that you really have to use the sendmail program.
Especially for MiNT `smail' is probably a better choice.  

If you have KGMD or KEMD installed you probably already have smail
installed (look for /bin/smail), if you have neither smail nor sendmail
you have to get one of them.

Mutt probably needs about at least 700k of free memory to run.

Installation
============

Mutt expects your MTA in /usr/sbin/sendmail which is the usual place
on modern systems.  However if you have KGMD/KEMD installed it will
most probably still reside at the old-fashioned location /usr/lib/sendmail.
You have to change this first.  For all the following log in as root.

	mkdir /usr/sbin
	ln -s /usr/lib/sendmail /usr/sbin/sendmail

This will create a symbolic link and Mutt will find now your sendmail
program.  If the directory /usr/sbin already existed you will see
an error message from the mkdir command that you can safely ignore.

Now for the Mutt files.  Cd into the top directory of the distribution.
You will find a subdirectory `usr'.  This directory reflects 
the structure of your file system.  Simply copy each file (or the
complete tree) to the corresponding location on your harddisk.
As a result you should find the files:

/usr/local/bin/mutt
/usr/local/man/man1/mutt.1
/usr/local/man/cat1/mutt.1
/usr/local/man/man4/mailcap.4
/usr/local/man/cat4/mailcap.4

If you haven't an older version of Mutt installed you should also
install Muttrc as /usr/local/share/Muttrc and mime.types as
/usr/local/share/mime.types.  These are the system wide configuration
files for Mutt.

If you already have an older version of Mutt the program will most
likely complain about unrecognized variables and so on.  Unfortunately
these complaints will vanish very fast without you having a chance
to read them.  Type

	mutt 2>/tmp/mutterrors

into your shell and read the file /tmp/mutterrors with your 
favorite editor.  Then read the updated version of Mutt's documentation
in the doc directory and correct the errors.

You probably want to configure Mutt to your personal needs.  To
do so you can either edit /usr/local/share/Muttrc which will change
the settings system-wide, i.e. for every user.  The recommended
solution for personal settings is to create a file .muttrc in your
home directory and put the personal stuff in there.  The file
sample.muttrc is Michael Elkins (the author of Mutt) personal file.
The file guido.muttrc is a summary of my personal settings.
See these files as examples for your own muttrc.
If you keep on reading the documentation you will find more
hints for some personal settings.

If you're really impatient you should proceed with README.terminfo
now and then come back to this file later.  If you start Mutt then
it will come up more or less with the default configuration.  You
will have to use vi as your editor...  Just kidding, it should
be possible to use a regular GEM editor:

If you want to use an editor with a graphical user interface from
within Mutt you probably need a multi-tasking AES like N.AES,
Geneva, oAESis, xAES or the like.  My favorite editor is qed.
It is freeware and it can be found on various ftp servers.  Have
a look.

For qed the installation is quite easy.  Check where qed.app
is, let's say you found it in /usr/gem/qed/qed.app.  Now edit
either /usr/local/share/Muttrc or .muttrc in your home directory
and add the following line:

set editor="QED=/usr/gem/qed /usr/gem/qed/qed.app"

This will set the environment variable QED to qed's search path
(necessary for qed to find its resource and configuration files)
and will then start qed with the file to edit as an argument.
If you use an older version of qed (before 3.90 I think) this
probably won't work.  In this case (or if you prefer another
editor) see the file README.MIME for some hints on how to start 
GEM programs from the command line.

A more sophisticated approach would be to write a start-up script
for QED (or another editor).  Escpecially if you receive and write
mails with 8-bit characters (special characters as used in non-english
western european languages) you should have a look at the shell
script `mailqed' included here.

No matter how you do it, what editor you use, remember one thing:
You're probably used to a kind of clever behaviour of GEM programs.
If one particular GEM program is already running and it is called
again by another program, it (or the system) will usually detect
that it is already running and will simply pass a command to that
program.  This doesn't work with Mutt (or any other mailer).  Instead
for every file to be edited another instance of the editor will
be started and the mailer will wait until you finish the program.
This means that you really have to quit the editor after you've
edited your file.  There's no other way to notify the mailer
that you're done.

You should now read the file README.terminfo before you start Mutt
the first time.

Guido Flohr
--
http://stud.uni-sb.de/~gufl0000/
mailto:gufl0000@stud.uni-sb.de
