Read News
]If you have access to a Sun SparcCenter (ub) central system
account you are connected to all of the other computers and computer
users that are part of the world-wide Internet computer
network. Usenet News is a public bulletin-board system which
allows you to exchange information with other people on a wide
variety of topics. Newsgroup subject areas range from
computer-related topics to hobbies, sports, science, entertainment,
social issues, job announcements, and much more. We recommend that
you also try the tin news reader program on ub since it
is somewhat easier to use than rn.
Starting rn
To begin reading news, log onto your ub account enter
the command rn at any % prompt.
You will see the following line on your screen:
Checking active file for new newsgroups...
There may be a pause of a minute or two and then you will see
something like:
Newsgroup name.of.newsgroup not in .newsrc--subscribe?
[ynYN]
Your .newsrc file is a file created by rn on your
account which keeps track of what newsgroups you have "subscribed" to
and which messages in those groups you have already read. The
rn program will check the entire list of available newsgroups
and ask you whether you want to subscribe to each one not already
listed in your .newsrc file. You can press a lower-case n if
you do not want to subscribe to each group, or a lower-case
y if you do. Since there are a lot of different
newsgroups this could take quite a long time to complete the first
time your run rn. If you press an upper-case N the
rn program will stop displaying available newsgroups to you
and assume you don't want to subscribe to any of them right now (we
recommend doing this‹even so, it can still take a while to set
up your .newsrc file). Pressing an upper-case Y will subscribe
you to all available newsgroups (we don't recommend doing
this‹there are other ways to find out about, and subscribe to,
newsgroups that interest you).
Each time you run the rn program it will check for new
newsgroup that have been created since the last time you read news
and ask you if you want to subscribe to them. This is a handy way to
find out about any new newsgroups of interest to you. You can still
skip this process by pressing an upper-case N.
Using rn
rn operates on three levels: the newsgroup selection
level, the article selection level, and the paging
level. Understanding this three level structure will help you
learn to use rn more easily since each level has its own set
of commands, and its own help menu.
€At the newsgroup selection level (the top level), you
may specify which newsgroup you want next, or read them in the
default order, which is the order that your subscribed newsgroups
occur in your .newsrc file.
€At the article selection level, you may specify which
article you want next, or read them in the default order, which is
either in order of arrival on your system, or by subject threads (a
thread is an article and the articles which refer to or
follow-up on that article).
€At the paging level (the bottom level), rn
behaves much like the UNIX more program, in that you can press
the spacebar to scroll through the article.
On any level, at any prompt, you can type an h for a
list of available commands. This is probably the most important
command to remember. Typing a at any prompt means to
do the normal thing. You will know what that is because every prompt
has a list of several plausible commands enclosed in square brackets,
and pressing the will always do the first item in the list.
You won't have to use the or key for any one-letter
command.
When you start rn, after it checks to see if any new
newsgroups have been created since you last read news, and gives you
the opportunity to subscribe to them it will then go into the top
prompt level‹the newsgroup selection level.
Newsgroup Selection Level
On the newsgroup selection level, the prompt looks like this:
******** 17 unread articles in umd.general--read now? [ynq]
The following are the options listed at this point:
y or - tells rn to do this newsgroup now
and brings you to the article selection level for that
newsgroup (actually, it goes the first article and displays it at the
pager level).
n - will go to the next newsgroup.
q - quit rn. You should note that it may take pressing
q as many as three times to quit rn if you are at one
of the lower levels.
gnewsgroup (and then pressing the or
key) - will go to the named newsgroup. If the group isn't currently
subscribed to, you will be asked if you want to subscribe to it. This
is how you add new groups to the list of groups you are subscribed
to.
u - will unsubscribe you from the current newsgroup.
Newsgroups available at UMD
At the Newsgroups Selection Level you can see a list of
newsgroups available at UMD by typing
l (a lower case L and then the key)
You can also use this command to see a list of groups that match a
certain pattern, for example:
l pattern
A few of the groups listed may not be available or may not be
active (they will have 0 articles).
Newsgroups of possible interest to new Usenet News readers are:
umd.general - a news group for discussing topics of
interest to people at UMD. This group will only be read by other
computer users at UMD.
news.announce.important - this group will have occasional
announcements of interest to the Usenet community.
news.announce.newusers - a very useful group for new rn
users. Read this group for information on using news, news etiquette,
various news groups, etc.
misc.jobs.offered - postings on job openings, mostly computer
or technical related.
misc.jobs.resumes - posting of people looking for jobs, mostly
computer or technical related.
Article Selection Level
On the article selection level, rn selects unread articles
in numerical order (the order in which articles have arrived at your
site). If you do a subject search (N), the order is
modified to be numerical order within each subject thread.
Following a subject thread allows you to jump from an article to the
next article with the same subject line, usually a follow-up or
comment on the first article, thus allowing you to follow a
"conversation."
On the article selection level you are not asked whether you want
to read an article before the article is displayed; rather, rn
simply displays the first page of the article and asks if you want to
continue. The normal article selection prompt comes at the end
of the article (although the following article selection commands can
be given from within the middle of the article (the pager
level) also). The prompt at the end of an article looks like
this:
End of article 248 (of 257)--what next? [npq]
The following are the options at this point:
n or - Go to the next article.
q - quit this newsgroup and go back to the newsgroup selection
level.
N - scan forward for the next article with the same
subject. When you choose this the first item in your list of choices
now becomes ^N, meaning that you can now just press the
spacebar to continue following a subject thread. Notice that this
command uses an upper-case N, meaning that you will have to
hold down both the and keys as you type the
n key.
p - Go to the previous article.
P - Scan backward for the previous article with the
same subject.
b - scroll back one page.
- go to the numbered article.
j - junk the current article‹mark it as read. This is
usefull if you are following a thread of articles but don't want to
read all of a particular article.
k - mark as read all articles with the same subject as the
current article. This essentially gets rid of an entire
"conversational thread"‹useful if there are a lot of articles on
a particular subject that doesn't interest you.
r - reply to the person who posted the article through regular
e-mail.
R - reply, including a copy of the current article in the top
of your e-mail message.
f - submit a followup article that will be posted to the news
group.
To post a new, original article (not a followup) The easiest way
is to type a $, which will take you to the end
of the last article in the newsgroup. Then type an
f for posting a followup article. Since there is
no article to followup to, rn will let you post
a new, original article.
F - submit a followup article, and include a copy of the
old article, with the lines prefixed by ">" .
c - catch up in this newsgroup; i.e., mark all articles as
read. You may not want to wade through all of the old articles in a
group you have recently subscribed to. Using the c command is
the same as having read all of the articles.
u - unsubscribe to this newsgroup.
s filename - save the article to file filename
in a subdirectory called News on your account. You can save
the file into your home directory rather than your News subdirectory
by adding the characters ~/ (a tilde and a slash) to the front
of the filename. If a file by that name exists, rn will append
the article to it. If a file by that name doesn't exist you will be
asked if you want to use mailbox format. Saving in mailbox format
lets you use elm to view the articles that were saved to that
file.
= - list the article number and subjects of unread articles.
You can then enter the article number of the articles that interest
you.
One handy way of reading a newsgroup is to type an equals sign
(=) to display a list of all of the unread article numbers and
subjects. If the subject of a particular article interests you, you
can just type it's number (and press or ) to go to
that article. After you have read the article you can type the equals
sign to display the list of unread articles again.
If you want to read most or all of the articles in a news group,
type a N after you've read the first article. Now you
can just press the space bar to scroll through the articles in
"conversational thread" order. Press k when you get to an
subject that you aren't interested in following.
Pager Level
At the pager level (within an article), the prompt looks like
this:
--MORE--(17%)
The following are the options at this point:
- Display next page.
- Display one more line.
q - Go to the end of the current article (don't mark it either
read or unread). This leaves you at the "What next?" prompt.
j - Junk the current article. Mark it read and go to the end
of the article.
b - Back up one page.
g - Goto (search forward for) pattern within current
article. Note that there is no space between the g command and
the pattern. If the pattern is found, the page containing the pattern
will be displayed.
For more information on the various features of the rn
program, you can refer to the online manual page for rn by
typing man rn at any % prompt.
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