News Transport Agents

Usenet news is provided over the Internet as a daily newsfeed of articles and postings for thousands of newsgroups. This newsfeed is sent to sites that can then provide access to the news for other systems through newsreaders. These sites operate as news servers; the newsreaders used to access them are their clients. The news server software, called news transport agents, is what provides newsreaders with news, enabling you to read newsgroups and post articles. For Linux, three of the popular news transport agents are INN, Leafnode, and Cnews. Both Cnews and Leafnode are small and simple, and useful for small networks. INN is more powerful and complex, designed with large systems in mind (see www.isc.org for more details).

Daily newsfeeds on Usenet are often large and consume much of a news server's resources in both time and memory. For this reason, you may not want to set up your own Linux system to receive such newsfeeds. If you are operating in a network of Linux systems, you can designate one of them as the news server and install the news transport agent on it to receive and manage the Usenet newsfeeds. Users on other systems on your network can then access that news server with their own newsreaders.

If your network already has a news server, you needn't install a news transport agent at all. You only have to use your newsreaders to remotely access that server (see NNTPSERVER in the preceding section). In the case of an ISP, such providers often operate their own news servers, which you can also remotely access using your own newsreaders, such as KNode and Pan. Remember, though, that newsreaders must take the time to download the articles for selected newsgroups, as well as updated information on all the newsgroups.

You can also use news transport agents to run local versions of news for only the users on your system or your local network. To do this, install INN, Leafnode, slrnpull, or Cnews and configure them just to manage local newsgroups. Users on your system could then post articles and read local news.

Mailing Lists

As an alternative to newsgroups, you can subscribe to mailing lists. Users on mailing lists automatically receive messages and articles sent to the lists. Mailing lists work much like a mail alias, broadcasting messages to all users on the list. Mailing lists were designed to serve small, specialized groups of people. Instead of posting articles for anyone to see, only those who subscribe receive them. Numerous mailing lists, as well as other subjects, are available for Linux. For example, at the www.gnome.org site, you can subscribe to any of several mailing lists on GNOME topics, such as gnome-themes-list@gnome.org, which deals with GNOME desktop themes. You can do the same at lists.kde.org for KDE topics. At www.liszt.com, you can search for mailing lists on various topics. By convention, to subscribe to a list, you send a request to the mailing list address with a –request term added to its username. For example, to subscribe to gnome-themes-list@gnome.org, you send a request to gnome-themes-list-request@gnome.org. At www.linux.org, you can link to sites that support Linux-oriented mailing lists, such as the Red Hat mailing lists page and the Linux Mailing Lists Web site. Lists exist for such topics as the Linux kernel, administration, security, and different distributions. For example, linux-admin covers administration topics, and linux-apps discusses software applications. vger.kernel.org provides mailing list services for Linux kernel developers.

Newsreaders

A variety of newsreaders are available for use on Red Hat Linux, including several specialized tools. Like the mail clients, there are newsreaders based on GNOME, KDE, Web interfaces, and the command line interface. All will work on any desktop, though those for the command line will use a terminal window to operate. GNOME newsreaders include Pan and Sylpheed, KDE provides KNode, Mozilla supports newsreader capabilities, and Pine and slrn use a command line interface. In addition, specialized tools like inews are available to post news articles. If you just want to download and decode binaries attached to articles, you can use Glitter to detect, download, combine, and decode binary applications posted as several encoded news articles. Check the GNOME and KDE software sites for the latest GNOME and KDE newsreader applications, www.gnome.org and apps.kde.org.

Pan is a powerful newsreader that lets you sort articles, decode binaries, and set up rules for selecting articles. Pan features both pane and notebook displays. Initially, newsgroups, article headers, and article contents are displayed in three panes. You can switch to a notebook display that will show each pane as a tabbed panel covering the entire window. In the newsgroup pane, a drop-down menu lets you choose whether to display all newsgroups or only subscribed ones. You can also search for particular newsgroups. For the article headers, an icon bar lets you display read or unread articles, as well as save and search articles. A selected article is displayed in the pane below the headers.

KNode is currently the standard newsreader distributed with KDE 2.0 with Red Hat 7.2. The KNode newsreader includes standard features such as follow-ups, saving and printing articles, article and newsgroup searches, and thread displays. It also supports more powerful features such as binary encoding and decoding, displaying attached image files, and separate window displays for articles. In addition, it supports multiple accounts, and customized configuration for features such as colors, fonts, window displays, and article search filters. You can find out more about KNode at knode.sourceforge.net. Other KDE newsreaders such as krn and kng are also available. You can download them from apps.kde.com.

The Mozilla newsreader is part of the Mozilla Web browser. You can set up and configure news accounts by selecting the Mail/News Account Settings from the Edit menu. This displays a sidebar that will include any news server you have already set up. To create a new news account, click the New Account button. This opens a series of dialog boxes where you enter in information such as your news server address and e-mail address. An initial screen asks you to choose whether you are setting up a newsgroup or a mail account. Once you have created your news account, you can then click it to display panes where you can set other options, such as the number of articles to display at a time.

The slrn newsreader is screen-based, with an interface similar to Pine's. Commands are displayed across the top of the screen and can be executed using the listed keys. Different types of screens exist for the newsgroup list, article list, and article content, each with its own set of commands. An initial screen lists your subscribed newsgroups with commands for posting, listing, and subscribing to your newsgroups.

The slrn newsreader features a new utility called slrnpull that you can use to automatically download articles in specified newsgroups. This allows you to view your selected newsgroups offline. slrnpull was designed as a simple single-user version of Leafnode. slrnpull will access a news server and download its designated newsgroups, making them available through slrn whenever the user chooses to examine them. Newsgroup articles are downloaded to the SLRNPULL_ROOT directory. On Red Hat, this is /var/spool/srlnpull. The selected newsgroups to be downloaded are entered in the slrnpull.conf configuration file placed in the SLRNPULL_ROOT directory. In this file, you can specify how many articles to download for each group and when they should expire. To use slrn with slrnpull, you will have to further configure the .slrnrc file to reference the slrnpull directories where newsgroup files are kept.