No doubt this question will reveal my lack of Linux experience. Would appreciate pointers where to pose the question or how to get an appropriate level of help -- or direct help here if some kind person knows the answer.

Recently installed Salix 13.37 with Xfce on an old Laptop. Salix is working great and the choice of distros seems appropriate for the 1.33 GHz Pentium III CPU + 256 MB RAM.

My issue is with not being able to get an HTML plugin (Dillo) to work in the default email program Claws Mail (v3.7).

claws-mail-manual.pdf (no version number given) says Dillo is among the plugins packaged with Claws "All of which are built automatically if the required libraries are present."

There is no Dillo plugin present in the /usr/local/lib/claws-mail/plugins directory. Browsing the available plugins displays the ones in this directory only.

So I downloaded Dillo 3.0.2 source from slackbuilds.org. It needed fltk-1.3 so I obtained this also. Then I wasn't real comfortable that I knew how to build and install it, having never done this before on a Linux box. I read a bunch of directions, help files etc. but still felt inadequate to the task.

I followed the link to Dillo given on the Claws plugins webpage and downloaded the Dillo version listed there, as well as the prerequisite FLTK 1.3. By following the README inside the tar file I built FLTK1.3 with no errors and Dillo with no errors. (But I don't know if the build was configured correctly for my software installation, and don't know how to test that.)

However, Claws Mail still does not know this program is installed.

which dillo returns '/usr/local/bin/dillo'.

file dillo returns 'ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped'.

I navigated the Claws plugin loader to that directory and it did not see any files there. I then typed in the exact path and file name and "The following error occurred while loading dillo: /usr/local/bin/dillo: cannot dynamically load executable".

The file permissions are as follows:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 881112 Mar 2 2012 dillo

I went back and read the README.Unix.txt in fltk-1.3.0
It mentions various how to build fltk on unix versions but does not mention slackware or its derivative, Salix.

I downloaded and installed a Dillo binary from pkgs.org:
Dillo-2.2-i486-5sl.txz
and installed it using the command:

#upgradepkg --install-new dillo-2.2-i486-5sl.txz

The install worked and when I run 'dillo' from the console, the tiny web browser opens and it works.

However, Claws Mail still can't find it. Claws needs a plugin with a filetype .so in /usr/local/lib/claws-mail/plugins, and the install did not put anything there. There is no dillo.so anywhere on the file system as far as I can tell.

So I am kind of baffled as to how to proceed. I don't know if my failed efforts to build and install a version of FLTK and Dillo left something faulty on the system that ought to be removed (if so, I don't know how to remove it). Is there a good reason why the Salix 13.37 developers did not include the Dillo HTML plugin for Claws mail (as in, missing library dependencies?) or was it simply an oversight? If it's possible to download and build this from source, can somebody correct the procedure I used so that it results in success?

Thanks for reading this.

Sky Meadow (Linux newbie)

Rebuilding dillo isn't going to get you a Claws plugin. Rebuilding Claws with dillo already installed might get you the plugin. If you've installed dillo from SlackBuilds, try using the Claws package from SlackBuilds and it should work.

now now
which Dillo do You now have installed? by running dillo what does it show?
there are namely three dillo versins and each uses it's own fltk library (1.2,2.0,1.3 for dillos 1.x,2.x and 3.x respectively)

then,
no dillo will give a plugin to claws, it's claws' job to get plugins for it's own abi, so You needed all long to :custom build the claws-mail package to have built dillo's plugin if any can be made that is.

A just skimmed claws and it seems to render HTML with webkit and I can't see what would it need dillo for? but I will check (build) it just in case...
anyhows, i strongly recommend doing a quick search on www.slackbuilds.org
Best regards,
Stevan C.

Thank you SCerovec et al.!

1. Removed Dillo with removepkg, as I do not need a tiny standalone web browser and it's not the plugin I was looking for.

2. The claws-mail installed from Salix Live CD is 3.7.8 and the claws-mail-extra-plugins were not installed by default

3. gslapt package manager lists claws-mail-extra-plugins 3.7.8 so I downloaded and installed those.

4. Included in the extra-plugins is fancy.so which is an HTML renderer. I don't understand why the Claws documentation led me to Dillo but fancy.so meets my needs so this problem is solved!

Thank you everybody.