I think the subject says it all! I have been able to
use the mail program on my old Ubuntu instasll which
I found quite handy. However, it isn't functioning
"out of the box" like I expected. I've tried to configure
it as mail was in Ubuntu to no avail. I am aware
that the versions are different, but I bet I am just
missing something silly.
Thanks!!!
-Glen

What is the error you get?
Do you have sendmail installed?

Sendmail is installed, but it shouldn't be necessary
as my ubuntu version doesn't have it installed. If it
wasn't clear what I meant, I just want to send mail
to the users on the system which amounts to writing
a properly formatted email to /var/spool/username .

The "error" I get is that after writing the email like
usual, the CTRL+d sequence on a new line outputs EOT,
and then the message never gets to the recipient.

I can just write up some code that does this, but I
just was hoping I was missing something silly with
the mail program.

Thanks!
Glen

You need a MTA to be able to send mails no matter if they are local or not. Slackware's default MTA is sendmail, so since it's installed, you have to make sure it's running (the default configuration should be OK). On ubuntu I think that the default MTA is exim.

hooray! well, starting sendmail did indeed do the
trick. thanks very much for the help with my silly
question...