Installing PINE on Debian Etch 4.0 from source or binary

The Pine email client is not included in the Debian Linux "main " repository because of licensing issues.
It is included in non-free. If you don't already have SSL installed, or, if you have the old version installed, you can just add non-free to your /etc/apt/sources.list, so that it looks (somewhat) like this:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib non-free

and then run     apt-get update ; apt-get install pine.

However, I already had a newer version of libssl installed, and pine demanded the old SSL libary as a dependency before it would install. I can't downgrade on this system, so I decided to install pine from source. I tried the source from pine's home page, and it wasn't compiling, so I got the Debian pine package source with apt and told it to compile it. It worked pretty well. The command to use is:

    apt-get --compile source pine

That left pine_4.64-3_i386.deb in my working directory, along with a bunch of other files. You might want to build in a temporary directory.

After the build I installed pine with:

    dpkg -i pine*i386.deb

You can probably use a similar set of steps on Debian Lenny 5.0, but I haven't tried it.

You can also try the newer "alpine" package.