Usenet News is a cooperative network of sites that transfer news between themselves and other networks, which allows you to read informational groups on a multitude of subjects from albatross to zima.
People post stories,ideas and questions; then other people respond creating a discussion group that you can read and you yourself can reply to.
(It is like being in the message base of the largest bulletin board service in the world.)
Usenet News is estimated to be read by over 10 million people a day with over 100,000 messages posted a day. There are over 5000 news groups to choose from, so there should be a topic that will interest you or anyone you know.
If you are using the menu shell, you can select the option "News Reader" for the default newsreader.
To invoke Tin, you can either choose "News" from the menu shell, or type tin at the shell prompt.
When started, Tin will prompt you with the names of new newsgroups, asking if you want to subscribe.
Tin defaults to a simple, easy-to-use menu based interface, and is a pretty good choice for a new user. Even so, you may wish to run a news client on your own computer.
This depends on how you are sending your mail:
In this case, you'll need to refer your software's manual; most news clients have an option in their preferences to set your "organization" line.
In this case, you need to set the value of an environmental variable. For instructions and an example, see the Common Unix Commands section further on in this FAQ.
"I'm getting a lot of 'bad overview record' errors while reading newsgroups with tin. Has anyone been experiencing similar problems? Does anyone know how to fix the problem?"
An overview database is basically a structure that stores the relationships ("threads") between different articles. Having such a database speeds up reading the news, since your newsreader doesn't have to figure out the relationships by itself.
However, sometimes an overview database will get corrupted. The reasons for this happening vary greatly. However, Tin and all the other newsreaders we have online will compensate and will thread the remaining articles themselves, rather than relying on the corrupted overview database.
Tin is the ONLY newsreader software that prints out this message and it is printed as a warning. All other newsreaders recognize the problem, but simply don't bother to inform you of it. (Since they can handle everything just fine without it.)
The overview database will clear itself up in a couple of days, so in other words, just ignore the "Bad overview record" message!
What you need to do is use the sort command to sort your newsgroups list, which is contained in your .newsrc.
That's it! Now you have a alphabetically sorted newsgroup list.
While we won't even try to give you an exhaustive list of News clients, we'd like to give you an idea of the more popular ones. We have titles listed for the following platforms:
newsserver.epix.net is the news server
You should not need to set any authentication features - leave them blank. You may also need to enter settings for an E-Mail client, if your newsreader supports this.
Of course, there are a few newsgroups that you should start reading right away. Before you do anything else. Even if it's a Monday. They are: