The word news indicates the set of messages posted to the USENET newsgroups, a service available on the Internet. Each newsgroup contains articles related to a specific topic. Reading a newsgroup is different than reading a mailing list: when you subscribe to a mailing list you receive the articles by mail and you read them with a standard mail program like mutt, which you use also to send replies. News, instead, are read directly from a news server with a dedicated program called newsreader like, for example, tin. With tin you can subscribe to the newsgroups that you're interested in and follow the threads. A thread is a sequence of articles which all derive from an article that we could call “original”. In short, a message is sent to the group, someone answers, other people answer to those who answered in the first place and so on, creating a tree like structure of messages and replies: without a newsreader it is impossible to understand the correct sequence of messages.
After the installation of tin (from the package collection as usual) the only thing left to do is to write the name of the NNTP server in the file /usr/pkg/etc/nntp/server, which you may need to create first. For example:
Once this has been done, the program can be started with the command tin. On the screen something similar to the following example will be displayed:
代码: 全选
$ tin
Connecting to news.bignet.it...
news.bignet.it InterNetNews NNRP server INN 1.7.2 08-Dec-1997 ready (posting ok).
Reading groups from active file...
Checking for new groups...
Reading attributes file...
Reading newsgroups file...
Creating newsrc file...
Autosubscribing groups...
Reading newsrc file...
Be patient when you connect for the first time, because tin downloads an immense list of newsgroups to which you can subscribe and this takes several minutes. When the download is finished, the program's main screen is displayed; usually no groups are displayed; to see the list of groups press y. To subscribe to a group, move on the group's name and press y.
Once that you have subscribed to some newsgroups you can start tin more quickly with the command tin -Q. The search for new groups is disabled (-q), only active groups are searched (-n) and newsgroup description are not loaded (-d): it will not be possible to use the y (yank) command in tin. When tin is started with this option it can't tell if a newsgroup is moderated or not.
Note that if you are connecting from an internal network (like in our example), when you send ("post") a message the address at the beginning of the message will be wrong (because it is the internal address). To solve the problem, use the option “mail_address” in the tin configuration file (~/.tin/tinrc) or set the REPLYTO environment variable.
