using NEWS

[Eliot]

I was recently asked about news readers for UNIX.  This may be of
sufficient interest to the community that it is worth posting here.

There are two different news readers that I can recommend right now,
vnews not really being among them due to its maintenance requirements.

NN	This is a fairly new reader out of Europe that is fast, menu
	oriented, and fairly customizable.  It is easy to install, and
	requires about 6 meg to keep up various caches.

RN	This is the tried and true news reader designed by Larry Wall.
	It's not the fastest thing out there, nor is it the most friendly to
	new users, but it has the most functionality.  This program 	requires
minimum disk space and maintenance.

There are a few others worth mentioning:

TRN	This is a derivative of RN that supports caching of discussion
	threads.  I've not played with TRN, so I don't know how much 	support
or disk space it requires.

GNUS	This is another relatively new news reader that runs on top of
	EMACS.  It is supposed to be fairly friendly if you are used to 	EMACS.
 I can't tell you whether or not GNUs will require 	much support, but if
you don't already run EMACS, it probably 	won't be worth it.
Eliot Lear
[lear at turbo.bio.net]