Reading Usenet News

One of GREX's special features is public access to Usenet News, a world-wide, "floating" conferencing system. Anyone is free to read Usenet postings, but for authentication purposes, only GREX members are allowed to post articles.

To read news, type:

!trn

at the Ok: prompt. Once you activate trn, you're automatically registered to the local GREX newsgroups, and a few important announcement-related groups. If you want to see a list of all available newsgroups, type:

!more ~news/newsgroups

at the "...read now?" prompt. Type "q" to stop looking at the list. (It's very long!)

To go to a particular newsgroup, type "g" followed by the name of the newsgroup. For instance, to go to mi.news, type:

gmi.news

To select the articles that you want to read from within a newsgroup, type the letter of the article. If you don't care about the topic in an article, you can "kill" it, so you won't see future responses. Put the cursor next to the article's identifying letter or number [typing n(ext) or p(revious)] then press k(ill).

Use the space bar to select the default command at each prompt. Type "h" for a list of options.