Reading News with pine

Reading News with pine

pine is great for reading news, particularly if you use pine to read and send email. pine has an easy-to-use interface and a slew of features. To use pine to read news, you'll need to

• Configure pine to read news (Figure 12.9).
  
  

  Figure 12.9. You often have to manually set pine so it knows where your news server is.

  
  
  
• Subscribe to one or more newsgroups (Figure 12.10).
  
  

  Figure 12.10. You have to subscribe to newsgroups before you can read them in pine.

  
  
  
• Read your newsgroup messages (Figure 12.11).
  
  

  Figure 12.11. From here, you can choose messages to read.

  
  
  

To configure pine to read news:

1.	pine At the shell prompt, type pine.
2.	Press to get to pine's main menu.
3.	Press to enter pine's setup menu.
4.	As shown in the setup menu, press to access the configuration screen (Figure 12.9).
5.	Scroll down to nntp-server and press . nntp stands for Network News Transport Protocol, and the server is where you'll find the news.
6.	news. yourisp.com Type in the news server namesomething like news.yourisp.com or news.yourserver.com (with your specific information in there, of course). Check with your system administrator for the specifics.
7.	Press to exit the configuration screen.
8.	Confirm that you really want to exit and save your changes by pressing .
9.	Quit pine.
10.	Confirm that you really want to quit.

To Subscribe to Newsgroups with pine:

1.	pine For starters, type pine at the shell prompt.
2.	Press to see the folder list. You'll notice that you now have a news section at the bottom of the folder list.
3.	Scroll down to the News on section.
4.	Press to subscribe to a newsgroup. You have to subscribe for groups to show up in your list.
5.	Press to get a list of all newsgroups, and then scroll through the list with the arrow keys until you find one you want to try out, as Figure 12.10 shows. Note that this can be pretty time-consuming on a slow connection.
6.	Press to subscribe to the newsgroup you highlighted in the previous step.
7.	Continue subscribing to any groups that look interesting by following the same process.
8.	Press (and confirm with ) when you're finished and ready to exit pine, or just move to the next section to read your new newsgroups.

To Read Newsgroup Messages with pine:

1.	pine At the shell prompt, type pine (unless you're still in pine from the previous section).
2.	Press to view the list of folders.
3.	. Ah-ha! Tab down to the news collection (Figure 12.11).
4.	Press to view the folder you choose.
5.	Read messages just like you'd read mail. Check back with Chapter 11 for a quick reminder about reading, sending, and replying with pine.

Tips

• When subscribing to newsgroups, you can just enter the name of a newsgroup (or part of the name) after you press to add a new subscription, rather than search through the entire list of newsgroups.

• Use $h from the message index in pine to first specify that you want to sort (the $), and then that you want to sort by message threads (the h). Using $h makes news reading much more enjoyable and less frustrating.

• After you subscribe to a newsgroup, you might have a few initial messages that show up as "No Message Text Available." Just scroll down to other messages.