Re: Basic gnus stuff

[Sebastian Tennant <sebyte@smolny.plus.com>]

Quoth Joel Reicher <joel@panacea.null.org>:
> Fredrik Tolf <fredrik@dolda2000.com> writes:
>
>> First of all, how is one _supposed_ to find existing groups to which
>> one can subscribe? I managed to, but I cannot imagine that it's
>> supposed to be right. I had to set the `gnus-read-active-file' to `t'
>> (rather than `some') to get gnus to fetch the group list at all (while
>> watching the NNTP traffic in Ethereal to even know what gnus was
>> doing). Surely, this must be too basic an operation to have to change
>> variable defaults to do? Or is gmane, by any chance, not fully
>> compatible with gnus?
>
> You might be mistaking a usenet issue for a gnus issue.
>
> Usenet, in general, has no wonderful way of discovering what groups
> exist. Either you know the name of the group already, in which case in
> gnus you can "jump" (key is 'j') directly to it, or you don't know the
> name of the group in which case you must perform some kind of search
> on the entire active file.
>
> In gnus there are two ways to get the active file. One is the
> keystroke 'A A' in the group buffer, the other is to go to the server
> buffer and then to "browse" a server.

Go to the *Server* buffer by typing '^' in the *Group* buffer.  Once
there subscribe to groups with 'u', and then 'q' for quit.  ('C-h m'
to see what else you can do).

>> Then, when I've subscribed to a new group, such as
>> gmane.linux.gentoo.user, I see a new article count of 182770, and
>> when I try to select the group, gmane asks how many articles I want
>> to fetch, defaulting to 182770, which I figure is going to take
>> about to the heat-death of the universe to execute. Of course, I
>> can select a much lesser number manually, but it still re-asks me
>> every subsequent time as well. How do I mark all articles as read
>> and wait for new articles to arrive?

'c' in the *Group* buffer will 'catch-up' a group.

> Please read
>
> http://gnus.org/manual/gnus_16.html#SEC16
>
> and in particular
>
> http://gnus.org/manual/gnus_24.html#SEC24
>
> or the equivalent info pages in emacs.
>
>> Third, I tried to use nnslashdot to read /., but it complains about
>> not finding w3. Which seems agreeable, seeing how w3 is not installed
>> on my system (but isn't it supposed to be installed with emacs?). So I
>> go about doing that, but it doesn't seem to exist. I download the
>> source, but upon trying to configure it, it complains about some URL
>> functions in emacs being missing. What's up? Has w3, and by extension
>> nnslashdot, been deprecated?  Btw., I use GNU Emacs 21.4.1.
>
> Sorry, can't help you. I can only say that w3 does not come with
> emacs, and it's quite separate to gnus too.
> Cheers,
>
>         - Joel

w3 isn't much good.  w3m is a much better pager that works with emacs
but needs to be installed separately, along with w3m-el (the emacs
interface to w3m).

Good luck.  Gnus does have a tendency to make your head swim for the
first couple of years :-)

Sebastian