2001.12_A Review of Current Newsreader Applications.pdf

FEATURE

READ ALL

Usenet newsgroups and clients

ABOUT IT

Usenet groups

contain a wealth of

information about

subjects so diverse

it can boggle the

mind. Colin Murphy

takes a look at the

weird and

wonderful world of

Usenet and

newsgroups

Paid for NNTP servers

Should Usenet becomes a must have facility for

you, but your ISP still doesn’t provide an

acceptable server, then you have the option

paying for access to an NNTP server. There are

many Usenet groups available and the majority of

ISPs will only carry a subset of these groups, either

for political or financial reasons. If your hunger for

Usenet demands a ‘full feed’, then you might

consider subscribing to one of the subscription

services like http://www.supernews.com/ to name

but one.

like demon and blueyonder, and the marvellous alt

domain, which stands for alternative and caters for a

lot of what wouldn’t fit neatly into other domains or

indeed into polite society.

You won’t need to be bothered with the vast

number of groups available, you subscribe only to the

groups you think you will be interested in.

In a group someone will post a message, a

comment, a question, or just leave a piece of their

mind. With luck, someone else will post a reply, and

others will post a reply to the replies, and these will

hopefully have some relevance to the group subject,

although quite often not. Just like email, these

discussions start off with a subject to give you some

clue as to what they might be about.

Usenet is open to all, which is both good and bad.

Usenet can be a most valuable source of information,

but you cannot rely on the quality of that information

straight off. It takes a little time, but after a while you

learn whose views are worthwhile.

Usenet is used for more than just messages; you

can also find a wide variety of data files, like

software, graphics or audio tracks. These are to be

found in binary groups. Often a discussion group will

have a binary group attached, so comp.sys.psion will

include a comp.sys.psion.binaries group where people

can exchange files.

Usenet can be accessed via a specialist client or

about food, television, beer and some of my other

favourite subjects, you will also find technical and

scientific information on nutrition, poor eyesight and

alcoholism. Self help groups and self interest groups

can flourish via Usenet. You could have access to as

many as 80,000 different groups.

A group is defined by the topic it deals with and

these topics are nested in an hierarchical structure.

For example, uk.comp.sys.sinclair is the Usenet group

primarily given over to discussing all things related to

Sinclair, be they C5 trikes, Black watches or ZX

Spectrums. This is in the systems group, which in turn

is in the computer group, and they all are in the UK

group, which is also know as the top level domain.

There are seven big top level domains such as

comp, sci and news to name but three. There are

many more top level domains, with country specific

domains like uk, ie and za, company specific domains

Free access NNTP servers

Sometimes your ISP’s NNTP server may not quite fit your requirements; it may not

carry the groups you are looking for, or it just may not be very well run. There are

some free access NNTP servers, which may offer a solution, one of which is

FreeNews (IP address 202.85.164.51).

LINUX MAGAZINE

Issue 15 • 2001

I n Usenet forums not only will you find discussions

FEATURE

through Web interfaces, probably the best known

being DeJa News, which is now owned by Google. If

you were to use a standalone client you would then

need access to an NNTP server. Luckily, most ISPs run

their own servers, so this shouldn’t be a problem.

You will need to know the IP address, or the servers

name at least, which will need to be entered into this

configuration file.

How you use Usenet depends very much on what

type of link you have to the Internet. If you have a

permanent connection, then you will probably access

the NNTP servers directly. If you’re not so lucky and

you rely on a dial-up Internet connection, you may

want to consider running your own local NNTP server

as well, using something like Leafnode. Some of the

Usenet clients also have support for off-line browsing

built in.

Saving time with Leafnode

Much of your time with Usenet will be taken up by reading text, which is a slow

process at best. If you’re using a dial-up Internet connection then this can be

wasteful of your telephone resources. Ideally, you want all of the most recent

texts from Usenet downloaded in one batch so that you can read them offline.

Leafnode enables you to do just that, by downloading all of the new messages in

a group that you have recently shown an interest in. These are then kept locally

so that your client can access them. So, instead of configuring your News

browser to contact the server directly, you ask it to look to your local machine.

Looking for groups to subscribe to

Any self respecting Usenet newsreader client will enable you to search for

newsgroups, either by looking just at the group names, or occasionally by group

description as well. On one server, the keyword ‘Linux’ produced a list of 367

different groups – not all will be active, not all will be in English and you can’t

even rely on all of them to be referring to Linux as we know it, but at least it’s a

manageable size. Groups that every self-respecting Linux Usenet reader should

subscribe to include: comp.os.linux.announce and uk.comp.os.linux.

Mozilla

If you are already using Mozilla as your Web browser

and email client, then there is very little you need to

do to start using it as your Usenet client as well. From

the main window select Edit/ Mail/ News account

settings, New Account, and select a Newsgroup

Account. All you need is the name of the Usenet

server from which you are going to obtain your news,

the rest you can make up. Make sure you are online,

click on the server entry in the listing and Subscribe

to Newsgroups. If this really is the first time you have

connected to this news server, then a list of

newsgroups will now be downloaded, which can

take a few minutes, especially through a dial-up

connection. Once downloaded, you can then start to

choose groups to subscribe to.

You can browse through this list, which could take

a while, or you can reduce the list to a more

manageable size by including some keywords.

Subscribing to a group will add this to your list. Click

on this group from the list and the latest message

headers will be downloaded. Click on a header and

you can read the body of the article. Articles that

have follow-ups and replies will usually be nested in a

tree structure, which is automatically opened if you

start to read a message in that chain. You can reply

‘

and forward messages just like you would with email.

You can now read your messages while online, but

this is a time consuming task, tying up the telephone

line and possibly costing you a packet. You can

configure Mozilla to download the headers and

bodies by default. Settings for this can be found in

the offline menus. Should the newsgroup be very

busy, you may not want to download all of it, in

which case you can flag the message headers you are

keen to see the bodies for and then download these

in one batch. The off-line features in Mozilla are

improved from previous versions and are much better

than those found in Netscape 4.x.

If you are just interested in finding out about

Usenet and you already use Mozilla (or Netscape –

the functioning of the two is very similar) for email

then using its News features would be a good place

to start.

You won’t

need to be

bothered

with the

vast number

of groups

available,

you

only to the

groups you

think you

will be

interested in

’

Knode

Knode comes with the KDE desktop environment and

so would integrate seamlessly if that’s the

environment you are using. Knode, according to the

Web page, is GNKSA compliant, but hasn’t been

Subscribing to Newsgroups

To help you limit the amount of News that you download, you subscribe only to

the Usenet groups of interest to you. The newsgroups have room descriptions, if

your News server supports them, to help you to further decide if a certain room

is dealing with your subject.

Mozilla - subscribing to some Usenet newsgroups.

Issue 15 • 2001

LINUX MAGAZINE

FEATURE

Message headers

Usenet messages, much like email messages, come in two parts, the message

header and the message body. Unlike email, which is, hopefully addressed to you

and of relevance to you, a Usenet message often might not be as relevant.

Because of this, Usenet clients will usually only download the message headers

first, you then decide which bodies are worth getting.

Knode: Not all the

graphics on

Usenet are

unsuitable for a

family magazine.

Pan, with some messages highlighted

for a future batch download

words of wisdom are sent out to the world to be

viewed by all and sundry, anything that might have

been hastily said, or even downright wrong, could

haunt you for some time to come. Here you are given

the functions needed to send special control

messages to Usenet which enables you to cancel, or

at least update, your previous posts.

reviewed as yet. It has support for MIME and usefully

supports multiple servers, which enables you to

increase the groups you can access should you be

unfortunate enough to have to use an NNTP server

with restricted content. It will deal with images

online, as can be seen in the screenshot, which is

something that Mozilla doesn’t yet support.

Knode is designed to be used as an online browser

only, so you either need a permanent Net connection

or run your own local NNTP server like Leafnode. It

has the full set of features that you need to take full

advantage of Usenet.

Knode can sometimes download binaries in

multiple parts, which may make it easier to deal with

than with Mozilla. If you are interested in taking a lot

of data files from Usenet then use one of the

standalone programs like bgrab .

You can score articles, which enables you to easily

cut through the noise on Usenet groups and follow

those articles that are of interest to you. You create a

set of rules, which can follow articles, or follow your

fellow posters if they always seem to have pearls of

wisdom. By doing this, these interesting messages

can by highlighted so they are easier to spot.

You are also given access to features such as

cancelling and superseding articles. Because your

Pan

Pan is part of the GNOME project but can be used

with other desktop environments so long as the

correct libraries are installed, which in most

distributions they are. Pan has good support for

offline browsing, so, if you don’t have a permanent

connection to the Internet and are bothered about

setting up a local server like Leafnode, then Pan

might be the choice for you.

The Pan developers are proud, and rightly so, of

their 100 per cent mark of approval from the Good

Net-Keeping Seal of Approval evaluations team;

making it the only Unix reader that can make this

claim, at the time of writing.

Pan gives you many choices as to how you want to

download your messages: you can download full

bodies with headers on a per newsgroup basis, or

flag messages and download them in a batch form

for offline reading. You are given control of how and

when Pan will try to make contact to the specified

Usenet server, which is important if you have

configured your system as dial on demand.

Pan also offers a full range of filtering features

(Bozo and Spam), with which you can easily avoid the

more noisy and bandwidth-wasting participants of

Usenet.

GNSK

Info

The Good Net-Keeping Seal of Approval 2.0 (GNSK for short) is an independent

set of criteria, which should be thought of as the minimum requirements to make

an NNTP News client useful. A useful source of information.

http://www.xs4all.nl/~js/gnksa/gnksa.txt

Mozilla: http://www.mozilla.org/releases/

Knode: http://knode.sourceforge.net/

Bgrab: http://www.student.dtu.dk/~c960941/bgrab/

Pan: http://pan.rebelbase.com/

LINUX MAGAZINE

Issue 15 • 2001

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