after battling with mandrake for about 2 hours I managed to install exim on an old and stripped-down mandrake install.
Of course it would have been easier if it wasn't a server that had been deliberately stripped down to be a web workhorse for a graphic and multi-media heavy international site.
anyway after much mucking about with the Makefiles and symlinking in /usr/lib I managed to symlink the right libdb to the right file in the berkeley db lib directory.
20 minutes of learning how to configure exim later I have a working smtp server closed down to only handle requests from our webserver and purring like a kitten.
great.
