Participating in Newsgroups

Usenet news is another feature that has been around almost as long as the Internet. Using a newsreader, and even many regular mail readers, you can select from literally thousands of topics and participate in discussions on those topics. To participate, you simply read the messages people have posted to the group , respond to those that you have something to say about, and send your own messages to start a discussion yourself.

To get started, you basically need a newsreader and access to a news server computer. The Thunderbird e-mail client includes support for accessing Usenet accounts. A popular newsreader that comes with RHEL 4 is called Pan. (For Fedora, the pan package is available from Fedora Extras).

Tip 

If you have never used a newsgroup before, check out the news.announce.newusers newsgroup. This newsgroup exists to answer questions from new users.

The Pan newsreader is a graphical application for reading, managing, and interacting with newsgroups. It is particularly adept at displaying attached pictures and downloading binaries. The interface is very intuitive and easy to use.

Note 

Although Pan is no longer included with Fedora Core, you can get a pan RPM from Fedora Extras by typing: yum install pan .

Although Pan was originally designed for the GNOME desktop, GNOME libraries are no longer required to run Pan. For that reason, Pan will now work on KDE, Window Maker, or other desktop environments without any special software.

To open the Pan newsreader, type pan from the shell. The first time you start Pan, the Pan wizard runs to let you set up the newsreader. Have your e-mail address and your news server's name ready. When the wizard is done, you can download the list of newsgroups available from your news server.