Doesn't Linux have a decent usenet reader?

[marc]

Agent86 said...
> 
> I was a Gravity user also, from when it was -Anawave- Gravity, then got
> the discounted license when the development went to Microplanet (who
> were guys from Anawave anyway, IIRC). I liked it for great text
> handling and light-to-medium binary downloading - never could get into
> Free Agent enough to want to upgrade to Agent.

Same here, but I gave Agent a spin. It didn't last long, though. I was 
reminded of this when they recently emailed me with an offer for the 
Agent v3 update. I gave that a spin, but it's still a cranky old beast.

> When my usage balance shifted to heavier binary usage, I tried NewsBin
> for a while because Gravity would often choke on the mega-header
> groups.

> I finally found a home with Xnews, since it was relatively
> speedy and saved partial binaries in a format acceptable to par/par2 -
> the recent (for Xnews) update in 2005 helped with stability. So it runs
> decently on my Celeron 333/Win 98SE combo, which is more or less a
> dedicated Usenet machine.

I tried BNR. It's cranky and buggy, but fast and does the job.
  
> But now I'm dual-booting with Xubuntu Dapper on this machine, and I'd
> like to find a good Linux Usenet app suitable for heavy binary usage -
> yes I know Xnews runs under Wine, but I don't want to run Wine at all,
> and it might be too much for the poor Celery 333's heart anyway.
> 
> I want to avoid Gnome or KDE dependencies, because I need to keep
> things as light as possible on the old creaky warhorse, so Pan is out.
> So is there a good GTK/GTK2 based Usenet app that won't choke on the
> mega-header groups?

KLibido seems to be the binary tool recommended. I don't do much binary 
downloading, so I can't vouch for it under load. I'm following the Pan 
list, and it seems that they have concentrated efforts on it as a binary 
download tool, which is a shame, because it had the potential to be a 
decent text news' reader - something it falls woefully short of 
currently, imo. My understanding, however, is that Pan is single 
threaded, which, if correct, will limit its throughput.

My solution is to run Windows under VMware! I guess this is less 
desirable for you than using Wine, though.

-- 
Best,
Marc