epeterso@encore.com (Eric Peterson) (09/13/90)
phil@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu writes: | Since I cannot find a newsgroup on news readers, I'll ask here. Try reading news.software.nn. | I am trying to convert over from NOTES to NN (due to NOTES being phased out | here) and NN is just not being friendly at all. The man pages are quite | ambiguous (apparently drawing on assumed experience with things like rn | that I do not have). | | I tried to point NN to one of my lists of newsgroups (so I don't have to | start all over with selecting my groups) and it simply exits without any | action or message (it should at least give a message if I am doing something | wrong). My list of newsgroups is in "group<NL>group<NL>group<>..." format. | Will this work or do I need to reformat these files some other way? I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to do here, since there are two different locations for lists of newsgroups. In the $NEWS_LIBRARY directory, there is a file called ACTIVE, which lists active groups and the number of messages in each group. This is in the format returned by the NNTP "LIST" command. If you're not using NNTP to pull your news off of some other server, your mileage may vary. There is also a file called GROUPS in the same directory which is in the format you describe ("group\ngroup\n..."). This is a list of currently recognized groups. Once you modify this file, you'll have to run "nnmaster -G" to recollect the database. There is also a file called ".newsrc" in your home directory. Each line of it is in the format, "news.group.name: <low>-<high>" for subscribed groups or "news.group.name! <low>-<high>" for unsubscribed groups. If this is what you're trying to use your existing list for, then you will have to modify your list of groups somewhat. | Is there any chance the database is out of sync? I've heard that this can | happen and really messes things up when it does. Yes it can happen, and yes it can really mess things up. However, NN has a mechanism to automatically resynchronize itself. Just check the manual pages for "nnadmin" regarding validation and "nnmaster" with the "-C" option. | Also, are there any ALTERNATIVE news readers available that use NNTP and | can be installed in a private area without any root access (just in case | we can't get NN working)? Well, I'd LOVE to have one (or write one -- if only I had the time :-() but another particularly good newsreader that works equally well under a spooled or NNTP-only system is GNUS 3.13 for GNU Emacs. I've also heard that trn is pretty good. If you have X-windows, xrn is a very good NNTP reader. Check with your favorite FTP site, or get the list of public FTP sites. It would be helpful in working out your problem if I knew what kind of system you were trying to install NN on ... Good luck to you. Followups to news.software.nn. Eric -- Eric Peterson <> epeterson@encore.com <> uunet!gould!epeterson Encore Computer Corp. * Ft. Lauderdale, Florida * (305) 587-2900 x5208 Real Time: Here and now, as opposed to Fake Time, which is there and then.