Hi, This is the prerelease of the NN for the Amiga. It is based on Kim F. Storm's NN 6.4.18, and was compiled for the Amiga by Alexander Rawass (a_rawass@informatik.uni-kl.de) This version you are looking at was comiled on 29. March 1993 Not all features of NN may be working on the Amiga, but the most important will! (1) What is in this archive? README.AMIGA - this readme install.amiga - install script nn-6.4.16.diff - the context diffs to the original source termcap - the termcaps needed (if you don't have them yet) bin/nn - NN binary bin/nnmaster - nnmaster binary bin/simplenews - simple news utility bin/amiga-aux - replacement for the original 'aux' /bin/sh script bin/amiga-back-act - replacement for the original back-act script bin/sendm - will be called by amiga-aux sample/.nnrc - needed to run Amiga-NN sample/init - a sample init file for NN help - directory containing the formatted help files help/manual - the (online) manual (2) Installing and using NN This version of NN will work only under AmigaOS2.* but not under 1.3, due to a bug in ixemul.library which does not allow fork() under 1.3 To install NN on your system, do either the following steps and/or read the install.amiga script: a) copy bin/* to a directory inside your path, i.e. UUCP:c b) NN uses the following assigns, so you have to make appropriate directories first: NN: directory where to find the nnbin and nndbase directories NN:nnlib directory to put the logfiles, the helpfiles, etc. I used UUCP:nnlib for it NN:nndbase directory where the database is stored you have to create a NNDBASE:data directory also I used UUCP:nndbase for it NNSAVE: directory where to put your saved files NNHOME: directory where to expect your 'home directory' and where to store your .newsrc I used UULIB: for it c) now copy the help directory to NN:nnbin d) copy bin/nn to NN:nnbin/nnadmin or use a link for this e) cause NN works by using the ixemul.library, you have either to install GCC on your system or to make the following assigns (I think they have only to exist) ETC:, USR:, DEV:, LIB: copy 'termcap' to USR:share/misc/termcap run 'setenv AMIGA' f) run 'nnmaster -I' this will initialize you database g) run 'nnmaster' this will be the first run (may take a long time) NN will work only under KS2.0, and it uses the ixemul.library and Termcaps, so you may have to install ixemul.library, Termcaps and maybe GCC on your system first. NN works fine with my UUCP installation (a mix with most parts from AmigaUUUCP+), but it will _not_ work with Dillons UUCP, 'cause nnmaster needs an activefile to read.... You'll also ave to edit UULIB:.nnrc to reflect your needs and your confuguration. After new news have reached your system, you should run 'nnmaster', this will collect the new articles for the database. Then you can start 'nn'. 'nnmaster -t -D' will collect new articles and trace the collection of it 'nn -g' will start NN and prompt for a group to go to. For other options and other questions, RTFM. You find it in help/Manual - you can read it via more or enter nn and then type ':man' - then you'll see the online manual. Typing 'a-d' for example will select the first four entries in the manual and SHIFT-Z will let you read them...have fun! 'simplenews' is a small utility, which takes a temporary files from NN and appends a (hopefully) correct Path:, From:, Distribution:, Organitzation:, Date: and Message-ID: field to it. You can use this also without NN. At the moment, NN is not expected to work with multiple users! It takes the information it needs from UULIB:config _and_ from UULIB:.nnrc NN ist _not_ a fully working port yet; some things may not work! What will definetly work is reading news, posting articles, posting followups, replying to an article, forwarding articles, cancelling articles, saving articles to disk What may not work are things like printing directly from inside NN or piping output into 'unshar', etc. I do not use those not-working features at the moment, and I am really too lazy to implement them until I need them, so you have to do the job yourself... If you have found bugs or improvements concerning the Amiga part of NN, you can send mail to a_rawass@informatik.uni-kl.de, but remember, I will _not_ improve errors found in the Unix-NN too, nor will I implement features I do not need! The following environment variables override (maybe not) the default settings: HOME home directory (instead of NNHOME:) PAGER pager (instead of more) TMPDIR temporary dir (instead of t:) LOGNAME login name (instead of uulib:config/UserName) USER login name (instead of uulib:config/UserName) NNMAILER not used NNTPSERVER not used TERM termcap should be set to amiga SHELL shell (instead of /bin/sh at the moment) FOLDER save folder (instead of NNSAVE:) NAME fullname (instead of uulib:config/RealName) (3) Compiling NN on your system It may be (and will be) that you do not like the pathnames NN uses, or that you will make corrections or improvements to the source code, and so you will have to re-compile NN. You have to use GCC for this, 'cause NN will need the ixemul.library, which is (on my opinion) not available for other compilers (at least not the glue routines!). In the files 'nn-6.4.16.diff' in this archive are the context-diffs to the original NN 6.4.16 source - the patches from patchlevel 16 to patchlevel 18 are already applied in nn-6.4.16.diff You have to get the original source first, extract it and then CD to the directory you extracted the source into. Then you have to run 'patch