How To Install xfaces on Ubuntu 18.04

In this tutorial we learn how to install xfaces on Ubuntu 18.04. xfaces is Displays an image for each piece of mail in your mailbox

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install xfaces on Ubuntu 18.04.

What is xfaces

xfaces is:

XFaces is a program that will display an image for each piece of mail in your mail box. This lets you know at a glance who you have mail from. XFaces starts out (when you have no mail) looking like a color xbiff. As you receive mail XFaces becomes a column of mail images. Some of XFaces features:

  • Both mono and color images.
  • Optional Shaped window support with both xpm and xbm.
  • Sound support using the NetAudio protocol. The NetAudio server currently supports Sun’s SparcStation (SunOS 4.1.X and Solaris 2.2), SGI’s Indigo and NCD MCX X terminals running NCDware 3.1 or later.
  • Face images can be “compressed” so that each image will only show up once on your display. This way, if you receive 30 messages from one user, list or whatever the image will only show up once.
  • You can use regular expressions to search any headers to choose images and sounds or ignore that mail message completely. This lets you specify an image/sound for mail that comes from a mailing list or ignore mail that you have already seen but left in your system mailbox.
  • Compatibility support for Rich Burridge’s faces program. This includes the ability to run user command to generate the image list.
  • Support for POP mailboxes.
  • XFaces can kick off shell commands based upon mailbox contents. You could have yourself paged when a high priority item needs your attention.
  • XFaces can run external filters to convert images into Xpm so that image formats that XFaces does not understand can be used.
  • The annotations for mail items include username, hostname, count, user@host, the contents of any header.

There are three methods to install xfaces on Ubuntu 18.04. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install xfaces Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install xfaces using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install xfaces

Install xfaces Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install xfaces using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install xfaces

Install xfaces Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Ubuntu. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install xfaces using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install xfaces

How To Uninstall xfaces on Ubuntu 18.04

To uninstall only the xfaces package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove xfaces

Uninstall xfaces And Its Dependencies

To uninstall xfaces and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Ubuntu 18.04, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove xfaces

Remove xfaces Configurations and Data

To remove xfaces configuration and data from Ubuntu 18.04 we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge xfaces

Remove xfaces configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove xfaces configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge xfaces

References

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install xfaces package on Ubuntu 18.04 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.