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Hi all,

This forum doesnt seem to see much traffic, so maybe I'll just start up some threads.

I'm having a blast with a new MDK9 install and was wondering what you all use/recommend for a Usenet reader?

Coming from a Windows env, I have most recently used Outlook Express and Xnews

I actually like OE for just reading threads but it blows massive chunks when it comes to multipart binaries. Xnews is great at decoding the binaries but the UI is a bit quirky to me if I just want to read a few messages. Overall, Xnews smokes OE and is by far my reader of choice.

My needs are pretty modest but the only critical feature would be to display whether a multi-part binary is complete. Xnews does this wonderfully...

Anything resembling this under Linux? Native app I mean, I'll investigate wine sometime in the future which will likely be another thread...

TIA

Back in the old days I mostly used tin, but that may be too ascii for your liking . If you're patient, the creators of Newsbin have expressed an interest in creating a Linux version, which would take care of your binary needs. Aside from Netscape/Mozilla I haven't used much else so someone else will have to chime in as far as what's good.

For email and stuff, Gnome's Evolution is a fantastic OE lookalike, works better than the 'real thing'.

Steel wrote:

Back in the old days I mostly used tin, but that may be too ascii for your liking . If you're patient, the creators of Newsbin have expressed an interest in creating a Linux version, which would take care of your binary needs. Aside from Netscape/Mozilla I haven't used much else so someone else will have to chime in as far as what's good.

ha LOL, no more console newsreaders for me, thank you

My first foray into the internet was back in university where it was all CLI on Unix. pine for email, vi as text editor and nn for usenet. You had to save every binary separately and uudecode it later. /totally dating myself

While I'm not oppposed to ascii, I'm very happy using GUI apps where it makes sense.

I've had a chance to try a couple readers that came with the distro. Knode is the KDE reader and behaves a lot like Outlook Express. Unfortunately it 1) doesnt do multipart binaries, 2) doesnt do yEnc, and 3) is slow as hell if the group has alot of headers. IOW, not too useful IMHO

Another reader is PAN. Handles multipart bins and yEnc very well. Kinda early in its development cycle (v0.13.0) but seems very capable. It should be a formidable app as it continues to mature. Still keeping my eyes peeled for something even better...

Forge wrote:

For email and stuff, Gnome's Evolution is a fantastic OE lookalike, works better than the 'real thing'.

When I migrate my email from XP, I do plan on using Ximian Evolution, which looks nice.

However my original query was regarding newsreaders, which is a function that Evo doesnt seem to have. At least I cant find any reference to it on ximian.com

Not a problem, I spent a few hours using PAN last night and I'm liking it more and more. The UI could use a bit of polish, but its the only Linux newsreader I've found so far that can batch process binary postings, automatically group multipart postings in the header pane, and filter out incomplete binary sets. Very slick

http://pan.rebelbase.com/

Pan is definitely the way forwards for GUI newsreading under Linux, it's binary handling and multithreaded downloading is ahead of any other newsreader I've used, including Xnews and Agent. I still use slrn for text groups because of it's configurability, though.

Mozilla has a pretty decent integrated e-mail/news client.

There's only 1 you should consider for Linux: Pan. IMO it's the best.