This is a blog post for personal interest and probably not of much amusement to others.
My work machine has a fresh install of the (soon-to-be released) Debian version 7 (codename “Wheezy”). There are a couple of modifications I’ve had to make to the installed software to get things working as desired.
Firstly, I’ve read really good things about mu4e – the “maildir-utils for emacs” email client. (Just for clarity, the author of maildir-utils has abbreviated its name to mu.) mu4e provides an interface to your email in emacs which is fast and efficient. I like things that are fast and efficient.
I installed debian’s standard mu and mu4e packages, but found that mu (the wheezy-based package) was not indexing all of my email. Firing up mu4e within emacs then trying to browse the ~/Maildir/INBOX – and being told there were no messages – raised some suspicions! So I removed that package and installed from source instead and, now, indexing works much better.
how to do this
Basically, it’s pretty simple. Just:
# apt-get remove mu4e
This will replace maildir-utils (0.9.8) and mu4e. Then download the mu-0.9.9.5 source (list of mu releases) and follow compilation and installation instructions from its install page.
On Debian, this will result in you installing mu and mu4e to /usr/local/share instead of the default installation point, /usr/share. To enable the use of /usr/local/share/emacs/site-packages/mu4e/ from within your standard emacs23 install, just create a symlink pointing to it from /usr/share/emacs/site-packages/ :
# ln -s /usr/local/share/emacs/site-packages/mu4e/ .
The software replacements are:
- with mu (0.9.9.5) from the package
other modifications
(Edit) I also installed gnu tramp for Emacs from source, but the reasons why I originally did this now escape me, as tramp has been part of Emacs for a while.
unrelated issues
I have found a worrisome issue in wheezy. When I attach an eSATA drive to my ThinkPad (T420) and copy lots of data – e.g. GBs of photos – to my ~/Pictures, I get some kind of kernel panic/X error. I’m still investigating this at present.
I will attempt to keep this list updated as I continue getting this set-up just as I want it 🙂
[ EDIT 10 April 2012 10:00 ]
Grabbing the currently stable, newest kernel source (ver 3.8.6) and compiling it in the debian way has seemingly fixed this crashing/locking issue.
