lear@TURBO.BIO.NET (Eliot) (01/09/91)
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@turbo.bio.net]