Hi Cristian and all,
I rarely post.. I'm a lurker, but since I have used minuet for a long time
both on LAN and dial-up, I figured I'd give some input on this.
First off, to setup minuet for dial-up:
Leave PC's IP address, Netmask, 1st IP address Gateway all blank.
Stick your nameserver IP in the Nameserver slot on 1st IP address.
Unfortunately there's no real good 'all-in-one' online newsreader solution
for dos that I've found.. I haven't tried them all but it looks like the
ones I haven't tried are more like an offline reader and you have to grab
the posts into some sort of local spool before using them.
The ones I'm using now are: minuet, pc-pine, trumpet news, and lynx386 (not
setup for posting).
Newsreader Pro's and Con's
Minuet
=======
Pro's
- Easy to subscribe/unsubscribe.
- Can download large group list directly to HDD so no memory issues with
that.
- Group list is useful for other newsreaders since you can hand edit
their "newsrc" or similar file.
- Great for newsgroups that have small message bodies.
- Easy to setup and will allow reading and posting.
- Messages are stored locally.
Con's
- If the body of the message is too big to display, you have to hunt for
the message which is stored in a numbered filename (eg. to process an
attachment).
- If the NNTP server reports missing messages, downloading of messages is
interrupted and you have to keep sending requests until you get past the
missing msg numbers.
PC-Pine
========
Pro's
- Well it works ok for discussion groups.
Con's
- First you have to login to the imap server.
- It's slow fetching headers of the newsgroup.
- Headers aren't stored locally.
- There's no way to get a set number of headers at a time (AFAIK).
- I had to manually create the newsrc for this.. not sure how to do it
within the program, or if that's possible.
Trumpet News
=============
Pro's
- This little newsreader is fast and great for discussion groups.
- You can interrupt while getting headers and can mark those read and
continue on to get more.
- You can list headers and get an idea of their size before switching to
something like lynx to download a large message body.
Con's
- Have to manually create the subscribed list (news.ini format eg.
comp.os.linux.announce Y).
- When getting the body of message the size is
restricted by free conventional memory. (but at least you can see how much
is left)- If you run out of memory, there's no way to abort.. you have to
wait until it's finished getting the whole message.. then the result is
unusable.
Lynx386
========
Pro's
- You can get a message body of unlimited size and save it for processing.
- You can bookmark your place within the group.
Con's
- You have to know the newsgroup name in advance. (minuet groups.txt helps
here).
- When you enter the newsgroup (eg. 'g'oto
nntp://nntp.groupserv.com/alt.binaries.sounds.mods), you are presented with
a few pages of the most recent articles, then you have to use the 'previous
articles' link as you go.
Well this is just some stuff of the top of my head.. maybe it'll be helpful
to somebody. I can basically get by with just trumpet and lynx386, or
minuet and lynx386.. I don't really use pc-pine much.. was just
experimenting with it.
P.S. Cristian, you mentioned minuet can only handle uuencoded attachments
but once you save the message you can use 3rd party tools to decode other
types... uudeview comes to mind. As for stacker I dunno.. I think I used
1.0Beta17 on drdos7.03 with stacker with no problems. I prefer this older
version since I don't need a web browser anyway.
Take it easy,
Wes
On Wed, 7 Mar 2001 22:06:47 +0200 (EET),
Cristian Burneci <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Has anyone mention Minuet yet? Minuet is a DOS email and newsgroup
>client.
> Back in the days when I was at the institute I was using it
>extensively. On a pure LAN connection. In fact I haven't been able to make
>it work on a dial-up connection, yet, because I don't know how to
>configure it for using dynamic-assigned IP's.
> Features: news, email, and FTP client. Recent versions include a bit of
>web access, in the way Nettamer and Lynx do.
> Drawback: can handle only UUencoded atachments.
> I can't remember what number had the last version, but I know newer
>versions couldn't handle Stacker compressed drives (someone on this list
>gave me this tip)
>
> Cristian Burneci
