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VOICE Home Page: http://www.os2voice.org |
May 2002
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| By Vaughn Bender © May 2002 |
I work for a medium size school division. At present our email client is based on
Netscape 4.79 for windows throughout. I have been searching for a cheap (As education
usually is)low cost if not free email client for all 800+ Win9x workstations. My
goal here is to get the browser and mail client separate. Netscape is the only application
we are supporting at the moment for both browser and email but is now becoming undesirable
for several issues. I was looking for an email client did not have any advertising
banners. Eudora and Opera have those annoying banners till you purchase it so unless
the school division would spend the money, that are not an option. I also was looking
for a cross platform package like PMMail but it was too expensive to purchase for
that many computers though I personally think Pmmail is an excellent cross platform
email client package. Ideally I could support it from my eCS system at work. In
my search for a cheap email package a tech from a neighboring school division told
me of a win32 email client that is free from all advertising and supports multiple
email ids in one package on a single workstation. I went to the site http://www.pmail.com
and downloaded Pegasus 4.01.
Pegasus is a win32 app that is supported on win9x,
NT/W2k/Xp. I was told that they make their money on the email client by purchasing
their hard copy manual. You are not required to purchase one but it helps it we
are thinking of using it and supporting it. It is rich in features.
Well, I installed Pegasus on my IBM Thinkpad running Windows XP and the install
was easy and it detected that I was on a Novell network and asked me if I wanted
Netware support. I thought that was cool so I accepted. After the initial install
I ran the app and it prompted me for the usual POP and SMTP information. It seemed
to be the product we were looking for in the school division PLUS it was Netware
aware. Pegasus recognizes Novell NDS and can be setup so that no matter what workstation
you login to, your email and address book follow you.
A couple of weeks had passed since I tried it on my laptop. My desktop PC has
only eCS installed on it and I had just updated my Odin with the latest build (this
was a weekly build from the beginning of February) and thought hey why don't I try
to install Pegasus through Odin. The win32k.sys driver was installed, so OS/2 was
able to see win32 programs as executable. So I went to my network drive on the Netware
server and double clicked on the Pegasus file and it loaded the first install screen
with winzip extractor. I clicked on setup and started the installation process.
Hey no problems so far. My next window screen was the Welcome to Pegasus Mail so
I simply clicked next to start the install.
The next screen brings you to where you want to install Pegasus. I have a separate
JFS partition where I install my win32 apps installed with Odin so I clicked on
the browse button. Browsing to your desired directory seem to work well. I was able
to click on the desired directory on my JFS partition.
I added Pegasus4 to the drive and directory that I had chosen and clicked on
the next button one last time and it started the install. Just moments later the
Pegasus install screen disappeared. I thought oh great it was not going to work
and it just collapsed and that was the end of it but about 20 seconds or more later
the finish screen popped up indicating that the install was a success.
Next I went to the drive and folder where Pegasus was installed and looked for
the executable that starts it. I found it difficult to determine what file it was.
It was not that obvious as there were several exe's to choose from. So I choose
the most logical choice "winpm-32.exe" and right clicked on it and clicked
"create program object" on the desktop . Then I labeled it Pegasus
4.01 and tossed it in my win32apps folder. I opened that folder and double clicked
on it. The initial screen came up. I guess I had chosen the right exe! The screen
prompts you with three buttons to choose from. You can create a single mail ID.
You can also create multiple ID's on the same system or that last option lets you
from what I could understand run it as a network app. For this article I choose
the first option and installed it as a single user on one machine.
After choosing the first option, the next window that came up asked you where
you want to put your mail directory. The program defaults to C:\PMAIL\MAIL. I have
a data directory so I pathed it on my JFS volume to a pmail sub directory. Finally
I clicked "OK" and the program was up and running on my desktop. The last
step you need to take is to setup the POP and SMTP and user ID. On the top menu
click on "File" and choose option "Network Configuration".
At this point you have two options, the first option is simply fill in the tabs
with your email id and POP and SMTP information or click on "Start Setup
Wizard" and fill out the prompts. Either way both accomplishes the same
goals to fill out the email ID.
I choose the Wizard and simply filled in the information and when it was done
I was brought back to the initial "Network Configuration" menu.
All the while I was doing installing and running through the setup screens I experience
no screen refresh problems, no glitches whatsoever. The only trouble I had was my
system became unresponsive the first time I started Pegasus. I was able to kill
it with "Watchcat". After the initial problem, Pegasus ran without any
issues. At work I run it with multiple email ids on a single computer. I have no
troubles with that option either. I tried sending a couple of emails to myself.
Both send and receive worked with no trouble. This package will not be my main email
program to use. I will continue to use Pmmail/2 as I have always. But to be able
to bring it up on my eCS workstation at work will enable me to provide phone support
for Pegasus to all teaching staff in the schools. The win32 support that Odin provides
has enabled me to accomplish what I need to do. Thanks to all the developers that
work hard to develop Odin.
References:
Pegasus 4.01 |
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