I took a little break today from the C++ and Lua stuff I've been doing to have a look at Google's new phone platform. I followed the installation instructions and had some demos up and running pretty quickly. I also grabbed the source and poked around to see whose shoulders they stand on.
config/config.php:
$smtp_auth_mech = 'login';
The default was none.
So overall all you need to change in the default config file to make SquirrelMail work with mail at 1and1 are the $domain, $smtpServerAddress (smtp.1and1.com) and $imapServerAddress (imap.1and1.com).
The other interesting thing is that since SquirrelMail is just an email client, you don't have to run it on your 1and1 web server to get your 1and1 mail. If you have a home server or one hosted somewhere else, you could use the same configuration file and SquirrelMail will go get your mail just like any other client would. Depending on how you use your mail you might find this a little more convenient and possibly faster than using your web server.
A while ago I started thinking about running World of Warcraft on Linux, and someone even left me a note about a petition for a Linux-native client a month or two ago too. I'd love to see a native client for WoW in Linux, but that's not here today. So I turned to Wine for the first time in years.
I tried Wine way back when I first installed Debian Linux in 1998. Things were different then. I'd wanted to try out Linux before then but I was help up by lack of support for exotic things like IDE hard drives. Yes, it was a different time. I was tied to a lot more closed-source Windows apps, like the brilliant IRC client mIRC. So my experience with Wine was trying to get mIRC running without really understanding Winsock, sockets, or any of that stuff. The program would start but never connected. Let's just say I was left wanting.
While I've been off doing my own thing, the Wine team has been hard at work and they've done some amazing things. Amazing things like working without an installed copy of MS Windows on your machine, supporting some DirectX stuff and generally taking a lot of the pain out of running Windows applications on Linux. My new desktop is a single-boot machine so far. I might try out MS Windows Vista some day, but I'm not in any hurry.
So the other day I started thinking about how fast my AMD 64 X2 4200+ computer is compared to my year-old Compaq R3000z laptop that I've been running WoW on. I read about some very positive experiences with WoW on Wine under other Linux distros.
Greenphone will be offered as part of a complete software development kit (SDK) and includes Trolltech’s Qtopia Phone Edition, a comprehensive application platform and user interface for Linux-based mobile phone. Although not intended as a commercial mobile phone, Greenphone has many of the communication functions and features found in today’s sophisticated smartphones. Developers can exploit these features and functions in developing their own unique applications.Pretty exciting stuff. Personally, I'd love to see phone built on Open Source software (all the way down to the drivers) become available. I know I'd pay extra to actually be able to get my code running on it. I've bought programming cables for a Motorola J2ME phone in the past and was wildly disappointed. I mean it seems as though manufacturers go to every effort to make sure I can't fully use the hardware I bought - from the unnecessarily complex SIM cards to the proprietary (and ever-changing) connectors on the bottom. Is it really that existing consumer formats for flash devices and USB ports don't meet the requirements of the phone or is it that they'd rather I didn't see what was going on in there? The software that ships on my midlevel phone is a joke. If programming it were as simple as connecting the USB port on it and installing an SDK then there'd be a whole lot better software out there and more people using it. As much as I hope this advances Open Source for mobile phones, I have a hard time being optimistic about it. Generally to do the really good stuff you have to have access to the carrier's network and they have complete control over who gets on and what they do. For some reason it's insanely restricted compared to Internet access that the average application can do on a personal computer with unconsious effort.