This page has drawn heavily from information contained on the slrn website and the Ubuntu Forums slrn guide. Thanks to the authors of both of these for the generous permission to use their work!

What is slrn?

slrn ('S-Lang read news') is a console based newsreader which is used to access Usenet newsgroup messages. Beside the usual features of a newsreader slrn also supports scoring rules to highlight, sort or kill articles based on information from their header. It is highly customizable, allows free key-bindings and can easily be extended using the sophisticated S-Lang macro language.

Website: http://slrn.sourceforge.net/

Some Preparation

slrn is a relatively complex piece of software to install and setup correctly, somr preparation work is involved before installing slrn itself:

Set a FQDN

Install an MTA

Choose an Editor

Set the NNTP Environment Variable

Install slrn

Open a terminal and type sage and press enter. The sage command line interface should start up. Wait for the sage prompt to come up. It would looks thus:

sage:

This may take a while depending on your hardware.

The first time you use sage you will be asked to set a password to secure your work.

Setup the ~/.slrnrc file

You have a choice of using sage either from the command line or from a GUI. In order to use the GUI interface to sage use the sage prompt to type:

notebook()

This will open the GUI interface to sage which is the well known Firefox web browser.

To start work with the GUI interface of sage click on the link New Worksheet.

The rest involves typing your sage commands into the input box and clicking the evaluate button that lies below it.

Run slrn for the first time

Installing the svn slrn

Jaunty Jackalope and Karmic Koala feature reasonably modern versions of slrn but for those who have a hunger for the cutting edge it is possible to run the development version of slrn by accessing its subversion repository. Both compiling and subversion tools will be needed as well as the required S-Lang library:

sudo apt-get install build-essential subversion libslang2-dev checkinstall

With these files in place the subversion slrn can be downloaded and compiled as follows:

svn co https://slrn.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/slrn/trunk slrn
cd slrn
./configure
make
sudo checkinstall --install=yes --fstrans=no

The installation can be subsequently updated by changing to the source code directory, running svn up and recompiling. There is of course absolutely no guarantee that this code will be stable and of course this is half the fun!

External Links

• Home of the slrn newsreader This is the main website of the newsreader slrn. It was redesigned and rebuilt for the release of slrn 0.9.9 in 2008.

• Slrn-user -- discussion about the slrn newsreader The slrn-user mailing list is open for discussion of the use, development and extension of the slrn newsreader.

• [Howto] Setup and use Leafnode-2 with the newsreader slrn Get the most out of your copy of slrn by using it in conjunction with the proxy NNTP server Leafnode 2.

• slrn patches and ubuntu repository/packages Thomas Wiegner's page of slrn patches and details of his slrn packages and repositories for Feisty, Gutsy, Hardy and Intrepid.