On Mon, Jul 05, 1999 at 07:07:41PM -0400, Jonathan Lupa wrote: > I'm looking for suggestions on how to handle newsreading > on my new debian linux workstation. =). I'm leaving forte Agent > behind in the windows world and am a little sad to see it > go, but here are my initial questions about unix newsreaders...
Apparently, it works well with wine :-) . Quite why anyone would want to use a newsreader other than Gnus is beyond me, though. > First of all, is there are way to set up a local news server > and slurp messages from my ISPs newsserver down to the local > one? I'm pretty sure slrn is what I want to do the slurping, > but I'm not sure what I should use for my local server. Preferences > anyone? As I understand it, slrn maintains it's own database and doesn't play with local servers. I could be wrong. Gnus also has an off-line mode which definately doesn't interact with local servers. I'm not sure how much you understand about how news works under Linux, so I'll defer most of the rest of the answer to later. > If the above isn't Possible, is there an all in one viewing > solution that runs under X and can handle multiple servers? > Given that my priorities are roughly: > 1. Handles multiple news servers. > 2. Can mark messages as "special" (so I don't loose the good ones). > 3. Looks good. =) > What would be my best news reader? The traditional Unix setup for newsreading is somewhat more complex than that on Windows, although it's not as intimidating as it sounds. On Windows one program does everything from downloading the news to presenting it to the user. This makes sense on single user systems with intermittent network connections. Unix systems have traditionally been multi-user with constant connectivity, so this makes less sense and the functionality gets split up somewhat. The big split is between server and client. On Unix systems the program responsible for storing and downloading the news is normally different to that which the user runs directly. The program doing the storage is known as the news server, and with some of the bigger ones like inn (which is very common for large sites) you also need a seperate program to do downlads. suck and newsx do this - they download the articles, and then hand them over to ther server. The server I'd recommend is leafnode (disclaimer: I maintian the package). It's not the fastest at downloading, but it does support multiple servers and is designed for use on dialup links. Once you've got it set up, all the group selection is done by simply choosing to read a group in the client. I used to use inn, but found that the initial setup was always very fiddly (it's all documented - but often obscurely). The Debian package may have improved on this, I switched to Leafnode when I switched to Debian so never really tried it. If you do choose to use Leafnode, you may find you need to grab the version from Potato - the version in Slink has a few nasty bugs which stop it dead in it's tracks. For clients, there's a huge choice. I've been using Gnus since way back when and have never found anything that can match it in terms of features or ease of use (including Agent). The interface looks particularly nice under XEmacs, and the adaptive scoring is a killer feature. The best advice here is probably to play about with the various clients and see what you like. Several programs, like slrn and Gnus, do integrate everything like the Windows news programs but I've never really tried it and TBH find the Unix way much more elegant. -- Mark Brown mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Trying to avoid grumpiness) http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~broonie/ EUFS http://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/societies/filmsoc/
pgpWpPcfPlR5N.pgp
Description: PGP signature
