[comp.os.coherent] cnews/wnews/rn

marc@skypod.guild.org (Marc Fournier) (06/23/91)

Hi Folks...

	We just got ahold of Coherent 3.2 from MWC.  We got
a feed working perfectly for mail, but I want to extend it to
news also.  I logged onto piggy.ucsb.edu and tried to transfer
cnews.tar.Z and wnews.tar.Z but as soon as I got it onto my
computer, and uncompressed it and tried to untar it, it screwed
up.  The uncompressing worked no problem, but as soon as I untared
it, it really screwed up the file system.  All the files contained
the same thing and seemed to be links to the directory.  I don't
know what happened, since I've used tar many times before hand.

	First of all, is there anyone within local  calling distance
of Toronto (Thornhill) that has it for me to get a copy from?

	If not, then could someone please mail it to me uuencoded?

	Please, if you are going to mail it to me, mail me a message
saying that you will, so that I can:

	1) prepare my system for it,
	2) so that I don't  get a whole bunch of copies of it.

	Now, I   don't know which...cnews or wnews...is the better, 
or easier one to implement on Coherent, but I would like the one
that won't take me forever to get going.

	The last option...which really is the preferable one...is for
someone to explain to me why it screws up.  It is really easy for me
to download it from piggy through ftp, but it doesn't do me any good
if it screws up every time.  It does uncompress to a text format file
that is readable, so I'm downloading it   with the right protocols,
but tar doesn't seem to like it too much.  I guess as a last resort
I could manually untar the file, but it is over 200,000 bytes big and
would take a considerable amount of time.

	I sure hope someone out there can help me...*smile*

	Oh...one more thing...is there a better mail utility then
the one that comes with it..that works on Coherent??  I'm used to
elm, but fear that it is probably not easily ported, is it??

	Thanks again...

thanks...

Marc

Oh...my mailling address is marc@nautica.skypod.guild.org  ...not the
address in my signature file.  sorry, i know I have to change it.

-- 
| Marc G. Fournier   (416) 250-8589  |   Haven't thought of anything  |
| Toronto, Ontario                   |     real witty to say here!    | 
|                                    ---------  And probably...       |
| uucp:  marc@skypod.guild.org               |          never will!   | 

joachim@jrix.radig.de (Joachim Riedel) (06/25/91)

marc@skypod.guild.org (Marc Fournier) writes:

> news also.  I logged onto piggy.ucsb.edu and tried to transfer
> cnews.tar.Z and wnews.tar.Z but as soon as I got it onto my
I modified WNEWS 3.0 MINIX for use with Coherent. A friend ftp'ed
it to piggy.

> computer, and uncompressed it and tried to untar it, it screwed
> up.  The uncompressing worked no problem, but as soon as I untared
> it, it really screwed up the file system.  All the files contained
> the same thing and seemed to be links to the directory.  I don't
> know what happened, since I've used tar many times before hand.
Uugh! Seems to be they still have their old tar.
WNEWS and I think CNEWS are tar'ed with either ustar or gnutar. If Coherent
old tar gets one of this files it creates recursive directories instead of
unpacking the files. 
What I did: go single user, try to find the recursive INODE with ls -i ..
and clri ugly_inode . Reboot immediately with no sync.

Afterwards:  delete Coherent's tar, always use ustar or gnutar (also on piggy).

BTW: WNEWS is easy to install but has less options. CNEWS for Coherent has
now a very good installation script so it is much easier installing it than
without the script. But my opinion is that only experienced News "readers"
should try installing CNEWS.
On piggy there is also TASS 3.2, a curses based newsreader. Very good.
There is also Geoff's- G-NEWS (no, not G'NUZ), another small news package
for Coherent, it should be available from MWCBBS.


> 	Now, I   don't know which...cnews or wnews...is the better, 
> or easier one to implement on Coherent, but I would like the one
> that won't take me forever to get going.
I use CNEWS on my Interactive 386/ix SysV 3.2
I use GNEWS on my laptop with Coherent 
I use WNEWS on my 386 with Coherent.

So that may give you an idea which program you should use.

> the one that comes with it..that works on Coherent??  I'm used to
> elm, but fear that it is probably not easily ported, is it??
There is COMB on piggy, a curses based mailer interface. I think that
now a smart mailer is in 3.2 that should work with COMB
WMAIL (piggy) is a mailx-clone and also not bad. But also needs a smart
mailer (like SMAIL 2.5)
Ftp them, try them but use  ustar  !!!!!!!!!!!!!


Ciao,
Joachim

+--------------------------------+------------------------------------------+
|  Joachim Riedel                | Internet: jr@connie.convex.com           |
|  Geschwister-Scholl-Strasse 48 | UUCP:     uunet!unido!connie!jr          |
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+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+

cedric@tfpbbs.uucp (Cedric Ingrand) (06/25/91)

marc@skypod.guild.org (Marc Fournier) writes:
> Hi Folks...
> 
> 	We just got ahold of Coherent 3.2 from MWC.  We got
> a feed working perfectly for mail, but I want to extend it to
> news also.  I logged onto piggy.ucsb.edu and tried to transfer
> cnews.tar.Z and wnews.tar.Z but as soon as I got it onto my
> computer, and uncompressed it and tried to untar it, it screwed
> up.  The uncompressing worked no problem, but as soon as I untared
> it, it really screwed up the file system.  All the files contained
> the same thing and seemed to be links to the directory.  I don't
> know what happened, since I've used tar many times before hand.
[..stuff deleted..]

	I don't know about Cnews, but the copy of wnews available
from piggy has to be untarred using ustar (a standard tar utility
included in the Coherent package, at least in version 3.1.0). The
syntax remains the same (ustar xvf wnews.tar). To fix the filesystem
problem, login as root and run fsck. It should report an error such
as : "I-node XXXXX is a multiply referenced i-node", or something of
the sort. All you have to do then is to clear the i-node using
clri. It worked for me...

		Cedric


| Cedric Ingrand,  Co-Sysop of The Floating Point B.B.S., Paris,  France. |
| (+33-1) 43.94.95.00 (1200) |  43.94.34.63 (2400)  |  43.94.38.40 (9600) |
|UUCP:tfd!afp!gna!tfpbbs!cedric | INTERNET:cedric@tfpbbs.uucp (might work)|
| Le monde de demain, quoiqu'il advienne nous appartient - Supreme N.T.M. |

cedric@tfpbbs.uucp (Cedric Ingrand) (06/27/91)

joachim@jrix.radig.de (Joachim Riedel) writes:
> BTW: WNEWS is easy to install but has less options. CNEWS for Coherent has
> now a very good installation script so it is much easier installing it than
> without the script. But my opinion is that only experienced News "readers"
> should try installing CNEWS.
> On piggy there is also TASS 3.2, a curses based newsreader. Very good.
> There is also Geoff's- G-NEWS (no, not G'NUZ), another small news package
> for Coherent, it should be available from MWCBBS.

	I'm having some problems with both Wnews and Tass. Wnews reports
errors such as "Cannot link /usr/spool/news/xxxxx, /usr/spool/news/alt/bbs/2".
I checked, and there was only one article in alt.bbs, there was no file "2",
which would have explained the glitch.

	Tass is even more puzzling : it doesn't keep its read-unread flags
between sessions, it creates bogus files (with names full of 8bit characters
(-: ) in my home directory, and on top of that it sometimes hangs the
terminal for no particular reason. I still like this one better than rn,
vn and the like. Has anybody succeeded in getting it to work "just fine" ??

		Cedric


| Cedric Ingrand,  Co-Sysop of The Floating Point B.B.S., Paris,  France. |
| (+33-1) 43.94.95.00 (1200) |  43.94.34.63 (2400)  |  43.94.38.40 (9600) |
|UUCP:tfd!afp!gna!tfpbbs!cedric | INTERNET:cedric@tfpbbs.uucp (might work)|
| Le monde de demain, quoiqu'il advienne nous appartient - Supreme N.T.M. |

lvds@tfpbbs.uucp (Laurent Cas) (06/27/91)

cedric@tfpbbs.uucp (Cedric Ingrand) writes:
> joachim@jrix.radig.de (Joachim Riedel) writes:
> > BTW: WNEWS is easy to install but has less options. CNEWS for Coherent has
> > now a very good installation script so it is much easier installing it than
> > without the script. But my opinion is that only experienced News "readers"
> > should try installing CNEWS.
> > On piggy there is also TASS 3.2, a curses based newsreader. Very good.
> > There is also Geoff's- G-NEWS (no, not G'NUZ), another small news package
> > for Coherent, it should be available from MWCBBS.

Gnews is great reader too, but... it doesn't allow you to post/reply on the
newsfeed and you always lost the first article on the list of a newsgroup.
but it is yet more easy to read with Gnews than Tass which always lost all
pointers ... here, at TFP, the only way is to read with Gnews and post with
Tass ; i think there's just a little disease... :-)

I confess, my dream today is to find a *complete* read & post package that
works fine under Coherent :-)
anyone knows ?


                Cheers, Laurent.

--- Nobody's seen a flight of pointers ? I just lost mine...

Laurent Cas,  Co-Sysop of The Floating Point BBS, Paris,  France.
UUCP:tfd.com!afp!gna!tfpbbs!lvds
INTERNET: lvds@tfpbbs.uucp (might work)

gsm@mendelson.com (Geoffrey S. Mendelson) (06/29/91)

lvds@tfpbbs.uucp (Laurent Cas)
>
>Gnews is great reader too, but... it doesn't allow you to post/reply on the
>newsfeed and you always lost the first article on the list of a newsgroup.
>but it is yet more easy to read with Gnews than Tass which always lost all
>pointers ... here, at TFP, the only way is to read with Gnews and post with
>Tass ; i think there's just a little disease... :-)
>
>I confess, my dream today is to find a *complete* read & post package that
>works fine under Coherent :-)
>anyone knows ?


Thanks for the rave review. GNEWS with posting and an IMPROVED news reader
is amlost ready. It should be out REAL SOON NOW. No, it's not vaporware. I
have been busy with other projects to include fixes from the BETA test.

Joachim is working on a GNEWS/TASS combination. 


Geoff.

P.s. How do I distrubute almost 180k of source code?
 
-- 
Copyright (C) 1991, Geoffrey S. Mendelson.              All Rights Reserved.
Except for usenet followups, may not be reproduced without permsission. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|                   |  Computer Software Consulting    |                   |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Geoffrey S. Mendelson           I've written and debugged almost eight thousand 
geoffrey@mendelson.com          LINES of C code under Coherent in the last two
mwcbbs!mailgsm!geoffrey         months.  :-)                     
(215) 242-8712                  And my wife still speaks to me!

joachim@jrix.radig.de (Joachim Riedel) (06/30/91)

lvds@tfpbbs.uucp (Laurent Cas) writes:
> Gnews is great reader too, but... it doesn't allow you to post/reply on the
> newsfeed and you always lost the first article on the list of a newsgroup.
> but it is yet more easy to read with Gnews than Tass which always lost all
> pointers ... here, at TFP, the only way is to read with Gnews and post with
> Tass ; i think there's just a little disease... :-)

I don't understand your problem. Maybe that would help also others:

I once got a beta test copy from Geoff to try his G-News. I had the problem
that I want to use TASS 3.2 with it. So I modified TASS and now am able
to use TASS for reading and writing news and GNEWS for all other things.
(TASS assumes a file inews, Geoff's gnewspost, his inews, also need some
parameters)
So I posted that patches for TASS 3.2 (the version I ftp'ed to piggy) to
comp.os.coherent. Never heard any comments.

So if someone wants my patches to use TASS with GNEWS let me know !

Ciao,

Joachim

+--------------------------------+------------------------------------------+
|  Joachim Riedel                | Internet: jr@connie.convex.com           |
|  Geschwister-Scholl-Strasse 48 | UUCP:     uunet!unido!connie!jr          |
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don@zl2tnm.gp.co.nz (Don Stokes) (06/30/91)

gsm@mendelson.com (Geoffrey S. Mendelson) writes:

> P.s. How do I distrubute almost 180k of source code?

ustar, compress, uuencode and post!  Source code can collapse down quite
nicely, and I think that a half-decent news system is a Must Have for
comp.os.coherent users....

If you can't or don't want to do that, please get ready to prime your
mailer for a *lot* of copies.....  (me for one!  I'm still using a
(dreadful) MS-DOG based thing....)

Don Stokes, ZL2TNM  /  /                             don@zl2tnm.gp.co.nz (home)
Systems Programmer /GP/ GP PRINT LIMITED  Wellington,       don@gp.co.nz (work)
__________________/  / ----------------   New_Zealand__________________________