Книга: Fedora™ Unleashed, 2008 edition

The Pan News Client Newsreader

The Pan News Client Newsreader

Whether or not your Fedora server is set up as a news server, you can use a newsreader program to read newsgroup articles. The newsreader programs require just a connection to a news server. It does not matter whether the news server is on the same machine or is a remote news server on the other side of the world.

Several programs are available for UNIX systems to connect to news servers to read and post articles in newsgroups. Here we discuss the Pan news client.

Pan is a graphical newsreader client that works with GNOME and is the default news reader for Fedora. If you have the GNOME libraries installed (and they usually are installed by default), you can also use Pan with the K Desktop Environment (KDE). Pan can download and display all the newsgroups and display posted news articles. You can launch it by using the GNOME or KDE desktop panel or from the command line of an X terminal window with the command pan &. Pan supports combining multipart messages and the yenc encoding/decoding protocol. Figure 5.15 shows a sample Pan display.

FIGURE 5.15 The Pan graphical newsreader is one of the nicest available for Linux, shown here browsing through a Red Hat usergroup.

The first time you run Pan, a configuration wizard appears and prompts you for your name, the SMTP server name, the NNTP server name, and the name you want to use to identify the connection. (In the example shown in Figure 5.16, we use a custom news server.) After the wizard has finished, you are prompted to download a list of the news groups the server provides; this might take a while. If you need to change the news server or add an additional server, you can access the Preferences item under the Edit menu to bring up the list of servers. Then, you highlight the appropriate one and click Edit to change it or just click the New button to add a new news server.

FIGURE 5.16 The Pan news server configuration window.

Оглавление книги