Red Hat® Linux® 7 Unleashed

Introduction to trn

There are many newsreaders available for Linux systems, but trn remains the perennial favorite. This is an old package but is simple to use as well as fast and efficient. You might not need a newsreader at all if you have Web services on your system. Many Web browsers allow access to newsgroups either in your own news directory or through a connection to an ISP's newsfeed.

The primary advantage of trn over the earlier rn (read news) package is that trn lets you follow threads. A thread in a newsgroup is a continuing discussion with one primary subject. Before trn came along, you had to read news consecutively from first to last, trying to assemble several different conversations into logical groups as you went. When trn became ...