Installing Pine for Debian GNU/Linux 2.0

Pine is a popular mail client developed at the University of Washington. It is not distributed as a Debian binary package, so if you want it on your system a small amount of extra work is in order.

Pine's Restrictive License

Pine has a license that does not meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). The reason is that distribution of patched binaries is not allowed without approval from the Pine project.

So Pine is distributed by Debian as a source package, which includes the pristine source along with the patches required to make the resulting binaries Debian-compliant.

It's nearly as easy to install the source package as it is a binary package, as we're going to see right now.

Installing Pine from the Debian Source Package

The Debian Pine source package comes as three files:

Create the directory /usr/src/pine/ and put the files there.

Be root.

To unpack the source you need to have dpkg-dev installed and issue the command:

dpkg-source -x pine_3.96M-1.dsc

This will unpack the pine_3.96M.orig.tar.gz source and will apply the patches automatically.

Once the source is unpacked, change to the /usr/src/pine_3.96M directory and execute:

debian/rules binary

After awhile (how long depends on how fast your computer is) the following binary packages will be created in /usr/src/pine:

pine_3.96M-1_i386.deb
pico_3.96M-1_i386.deb
pilot_3.96M-1_i386.deb

Now you can install the packages with dpkg just like you normally would:

dpkg -i pine_3.96M-1_i386.deb
dpkg -i pico_3.96M-1_i386.deb
dpkg -i pilot_3.96M-1_i386.deb

And that's all there is to that!

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Last modified: 29-Apr-99 by Pann McCuaig.