fetchmail gmail set up problem

[Henry Yen]

On Mon, Feb 07, 2011 at 08:06:59AM -0500, Jude DaShiell wrote:
> As near as I can tell, slackware 13.0 doesn't appear to have a cache of 
> root certificates to download and use.  Since there's no trusted 
> certificate provided for google by slackware, I probably will be replacing 
> slackware with a better distribution that has these packages either 
> shipped with it or available for download.

That's interesting.  I think your observation hits the nail on the head.

I found a posting that also suggests that these are missing from slackware 13:

   http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-software-2/how-to-import-use-cacert-ssl-root-certificate-to-use-ssl-with-xchat-irc-client-796559/

On all of the systems that have openssl installed here, there is either a file
called "ca-bundle.crt" that contains all (for most values of "all") of the
root certificates, or the separate certificates are present.  The FAQ at
openssl.org states that openssl itself doesn't include the bundle (nor the
root certificates); presumably, downstream distributions (other than
slackware) bundle these together with the raw openssl package.  For example,
my Red Hat systems show that file included in their openssl RPM.

The ca-bundle file is also included with other software packages, so it's
possible it's already on your system somewhere.  Here, I saw it included with
Adobe Acrobat Reader, curl, apache2, squirrelmail, mutt, and perl.  If
"locate/updatedb" is running on your system, then "locate ca-bundle" might
turn it up.  If not, then try the longer/slower

   find / -type f -a -name "ca-bundle*"

I think if you were to google for "ca-bundle.crt", you'd be able to find
many references for where to get a recent copy.  Among other things, you
could grab an RPM or DEB package from fedora or deb/untu, and manually
extract it.  I suspect, however, that the bundle file has been deprecated
in favor of individual certificate files over the last few years; since I
don't recall any changes to the root certificate holders recently, the
older bundle file should suffice, I would guess.

As far as distributions go, slackware in general is among the most
stable (this post is being typed on a slackware system installed
December 1994).  Depending on what attribute(s) are most important to
you, I wouldn't quite abandon it yet.  That said, there are slackware
offshoots that take the basic slackware and add user-friendly bits
(for some values of "user", and other values of "friendly"), similar to
ubuntu being an offshoot of debian.

--
Henry Yen                                       Aegis Information Systems, Inc.
Senior Systems Programmer                       Hicksville, New York