ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) (02/12/88)
There was a news reader program posted to comp.sources.unix a couple of days ago. After the tty driver gets fully debugged, there may be lots of interest in reading news directly on MINIX. Anybody interested in taking a look at this news reader and evaluating its potential for MINIX? About a year ago, Henry Spencer mentioned that he and a colleague also had a news reader program, although I don't remember much about it. Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)
paradis@encore.UUCP (Jim Paradis) (02/17/88)
In article <1851@botter.cs.vu.nl> ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes: > >There was a news reader program posted to comp.sources.unix a couple of days >ago. After the tty driver gets fully debugged, there may be lots of interest >in reading news directly on MINIX. Anybody interested in taking a look at >this news reader and evaluating its potential for MINIX? Believe me, Andy... a news *reader* program is going to be the easiest part of doing news under MINIX! I've been looking into this (after all, one of the major reasons I got into MINIX in the first place was the fact that I wanted to do news on my home computer). I brought the sources for 2.11 news over to my machine, and it took me several hours just to get the damn MAKEFILE to work! Seems as though MINIX make does not allow you to define a macro in terms of another macro. Thus, if you have the following in a makefile: FOO = BAR BAZ = ${FOO} then BAZ takes on the value "${FOO}" rather than "BAR". It's going to be a while before we'll see news on MINIX (tho I'm working on it...) BTW - my machine IS currently up and running as a mail site. If anyone wants to e-mail to a MINIX machine, you can send it to "...decvax!encore!jrpmnx!paradis". Consult the .signature for alternate paths to encore. +----------------+ Jim Paradis linus--+ +--+-------------+ | Encore Computer Corp. necntc--| | | E N C O R E | | 257 Cedar Hill St. ihnp4--+-encore!paradis | +-------------+--+ Marlboro MA 01752 decvax--| +----------------+ (617) 460-0500 talcott--+ ...coated with sesame seeds, and garnished with lark's vomit!
roskos@csed-1.UUCP (Eric Roskos) (02/19/88)
In article <1851@botter.cs.vu.nl>, ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes: > There was a news reader program posted to comp.sources.unix a couple of days > ago. After the tty driver gets fully debugged, there may be lots of interest > in reading news directly on MINIX. Anybody interested in taking a look at > this news reader and evaluating its potential for MINIX? [Personal opinion follows! Your opinion may be opposite.] I hope if someone does this they will also consider looking at the 'vnews' sources that come with the Usenet news distribution; after installing and trying to use [on Unix] the above news reader here for about a week, I've decided that it is more useful for quickly looking up some article you remember in the past than reading the news. It has a lot of familiar 'vnews' commands missing, takes a long time to start up, and once it's shown you a list of articles, seems to assume you've read them even if you haven't. But, as I said, this is just opinion. I used to have 'vnews' running under DOS back when I received news on the PC, it is not that hard to port; it took about 3 days I think... the one that comes with the news distribution is *not* the enormous, slow, machine dependent one that requires 'afbuild' to build a big hash table of the articles, etc. -- Eric Roskos, IDA (...dgis!csed-1!roskos or csed-1!roskos@HC.DSPO.GOV)
bing@galbp.LBP.HARRIS.COM (Bing Bang) (02/19/88)
In article <2677@encore.UUCP> paradis@encore.UUCP (Jim Paradis) writes: > >BTW - my machine IS currently up and running as a mail site. If anyone wants >to e-mail to a MINIX machine, you can send it to "...decvax!encore!jrpmnx!paradis". does this mean you have uucp working for minix? and a mailer? i'm looking to port dcp to my tty driver but if you have something that already works, why don't you post it. i'll be most greatful if i could get uucp or clone working without the effort of a full port. -- Bing H. Bang +--------------------------------------------------------+ Harris/Lanier |OS/2 on PS/2: Half an operating system on half a machine| Atlanta GA +--------------------------------------------------------+
rmtodd@uokmax.UUCP (Richard Michael Todd) (02/20/88)
In article <1851@botter.cs.vu.nl> ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes: >There was a news reader program posted to comp.sources.unix a couple of days >ago. After the tty driver gets fully debugged, there may be lots of interest >in reading news directly on MINIX. Anybody interested in taking a look at >this news reader and evaluating its potential for MINIX? Well, the news reader vn probably woundn't be too difficult to port to MINIX, since it only uses termcap and not curses, and much of the stuff specific to SysV or BSD seems to be well #ifdefed. However once you get it ported, it won't do you any good 'cause there won't be anything there for it to read! Vn, or Larry Wall's rn, or readnews, or whatever program you use for reading, only reads the news; it doesn't get the news articles onto your system. All vn or any other news reader is is a fancy way to do a "more" or its equivalent on a bunch of files and keep track of which ones have already been seen by the user. In order to get netnews running on your PC you need other stuff besides just the newsreader. As Jim Paradis pointed out, the reader's the easy part. One needs: 1. A serial tty driver. The Paradis driver is probably good enough for netnews use if you either A) have an AT or B) don't mind having to transfer all your news at 1200 baud. This has been a main stumbling block to running netnews under MINIX. 2. A uucp-like comm program (e.g. DCP). Since you'll probably be getting a newsfeed from a UNIX site, your system needs to speak the same protocol that it does, and this means UUCP. There are at least three PD UUCP clones about; the one I'm familiar with is DCP. Last I heard, Jim Paradis had ported DCP to MINIX, but there were still some problems with file transfers. Has this been fixed? 3. The netnews-transfer software. This is the software that both ends of the news link use to handle the collections of news articles ("batches") that are transferred over UUCP. The purpose of the news software is to read the incoming batches, break them up into individual articles, do some messing around with the headers, put copies of the articles in the appropriate subdirectories of /usr/spool/news, and ,if your system feeds another site, prepare batches to go to it. There are also auxilary programs like "expire", which deletes news articles older than a specified limit. The most commonly used news software on the Usenet is called "B News". 4. Once you've got all the above, then you need a news reader program like vn. >About a year ago, Henry Spencer mentioned that he and a colleague also had a >news reader program, although I don't remember much about it. I think you're referring to C News by Henry Spencer and Geoff Collyer of the Univ. of Toronto. It is *not* a news reader; rather it is a rewritten-from-scratch replacement for the current B News, with several improvements, most notably improved speed. Currently the C News software is in alpha test (not even beta test yet), but it's reportedly fairly bug-free even so. Either B News or C News should be possible to port to MINIX (or at least easier to port than porting them to MSDOS is :-). Netnews is a fairly large and complex system (the source code to C News runs ca. 600K bytes), but there shouldn't be too much trouble in the port. Spencer and Collyer worked fairly hard to ensure portability among various dialects, including V7; I'm not too familiar with B News internals, but I believe it also has appropriate #ifdefs for V7. So you see, Andy, it should be possible to get a PC under MINIX onto this here network, but it's considerably more involved than just porting the one program you mentioned. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Richard Todd USSnail:820 Annie Court,Norman OK 73069 UUCP: {allegra!cbosgd|ihnp4}!occrsh!uokmax!rmtodd