Airmail is “a message program specifically designed for connectioto a HF radio mailbox station.” it is “a 32-bit program which runs under Windows-95, 98, NT, 2000 or XP”. For the last few weeks I’ve been testing it on Ubuntu using Wine. My Linux laptop is re-cycled, so it didn’t come with an OS. So I installed Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition. After installing my APRS application of choice, Xastir (from source of course). I happened to read somewhere that Airmail seemed to work reasonably well with Wine. So I tried that as well.

After installing Wine (apt-get install wine), I downloaded airmail, and one double click later it was installing. Better than that, I’ve had it running since (needed no reboots!) I’ve tested the VHF Packet Module, POP/SMTP Client, POP/SMTP server, Telnet Client, and all seems to be working as it should. There is one quirk I’ve found.

There is an option in the mail client to “Check Spelling as you type” and this is enabled by default. With this enabled, text in the ‘body’ of a message appears white on a white background (and is thus invisible). Once disabled it works fine. It took me a while to find the solution and this question has appeared a few times on the airmail list, and the simple fix is to select “Tools” then “Options”, then the “Spelling” tab which is the 8th from the left, and make sure there is no ‘tic’ in the  “Check Spelling as you type” box.

If this works for you, send me a mail, ei7ig at winlink dot org