MT Platform Support

What OS platforms are supported?

FreeBSD
Mail::Toaster was written for FreeBSD so the FreeBSD implementation is by far the most mature and reliable.

If you are installing a new system, choose the latest released version of FreeBSD, which today is version 6.2. There are not many good reasons to use the older 5.x releases for a new install. FreeBSD 4 will probably still work, but is no longer officially supported by Mail Toaster or FreeBSD.

Mac OS X (Darwin)
The port to Mac OS X has been slowly maturing and is nearly feature complete. It runs on Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server. With the extremely reasonable pricing of Xserve hardware, I get more build requests for OS X. Of course, the more build requests I get, the more robust the code becomes. :)

Linux
I have only built a few Linux systems. However, I get frequent reports from folks who have had little trouble installing Mail Toaster on Linux. If you are a reasonably competent Linux sysadmin, you will be able to get it working without much fussing.

Which platform is best?
Many a holy war has erupted over that question. If you know a particular flavor of Unix or Linux best, use it. Chances are you will have better luck on a platform you are familiar with. If you are new to Unix-like systems, buy a dual G5 and run Mac OS X. You will have a fantastic desktop system to send emails and browse web pages with. You can use all them spare CPU cycles to run your email server.

For a dedicated email system, FreeBSD is the preferred platform due to its performance, reliability, scalability, security, and general administrator friendliness. When it comes to internet servers, FreeBSD is (arguably) the finest computing platforms available.

Is there 64 bit support yet?

Mail Toaster has been successfully installed on FreeBSD amd64 and FreeBSD sparc, as well as Mac OS X running on 64 bit PowerPC G5 processors. Mail Toaster installs and runs as well as on most any 32 bit system.

When will you add support for my platform?

The scripts are easily extensible in anticipation of using them on platforms other than FreeBSD where they were developed. There is also basic support for Linux and I have installed Mail Toaster on Mandrake (icky), Fedora Core, Debian, and RedHat.

Other OS platforms support will arrive when someone hires me to install Mail Toaster on that platform. Platforms that use the BSD ports tree (NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD) should have few problems getting Mail Toaster to install.