At the time of this writing, the only way to access email from an OLPC laptop is via https://mail.hcoop.net, and there is no easy way to successfully browse that site, due to a bug in the OLPC web browser. Here is how to work around the issue.
Prerequisites
- Another computer with Internet access must be present.
The certutil tool must be installed on your other computer. For Debian and Ubuntu, this means installing the libnss3-tools package.
- You must have either a USB thumb drive or an SD card with card reader.
Instructions
- Insert the USB thumb drive or SD card into the OLPC.
- Bring up the Terminal activity on the OLPC.
Figure out where the card or drive has been mounted. This can be done by typing ls /media and looking for a folder of the form XXXX-XXXX. We'll denote this path as $DIR.
mkdir $DIR/mozilla
cp ~/.sugar/default/gecko/*.db $DIR/mozilla
- Unmount the drive or card by bringing up the Journal activity, hovering over the icon, and clicking "Unmount".
Insert the card or drive into your computer. Figure out where the drive was mounted -- we'll denote this as $DRIVE.
Download http://hcoop.net/ca/ca.crt.
- Switch to the directory where you downloaded that file.
certutil -A -n hcoop -t C,C,C -d $DRIVE/mozilla -i ca.crt
- Unmount the drive or card from your computer. Mount it into the OLPC again.
- Close any Browse activities that you may have open.
Switch to the Terminal activity and run
cp $DIR/mozilla/*.db ~/.sugar/default/gecko/
- Future instances of the Browse activity will then be able to browse HTTPS hcoop websites.