This is the official home page of slrn. slrn (``s-lang read news'') is a newsreader, i.e. a program that accesses a newsserver to read messages from the Internet News service (also known as ``Usenet''). It runs in console mode on various Unix-like systems (including Linux), 32-bit Windows, OS/2, BeOS, Mac OS X and VMS. Beside the usual features of a newsreader, slrn 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. Offline reading is possible by using either slrnpull (shipped with slrn) or a local newsserver (like leafnode or INN).
The original author of slrn is John E. Davis; since version 0.9.7.0, the program is maintained by Thomas Schultz, with the help of a great number of people who make contributions.

The current status of slrn

The latest stable version of slrn is 0.9.8.1, released on 2004-10-07. A developer snapshot featuring slang-2 support is available from our patches page.

What's new?

[2004-10-07] Released slrn 0.9.8.1

I decided to make one more release before the upcoming transition to slang-2, so here it is. Compared to 0.9.8.0, it mainly offers a bunch of bug fixes, but also gives a (minor, but convenient) bit of new functionality (see list of changes). Please use our download page to get the tarball.

[2003-08-25] Released slrn 0.9.8.0

Yes, it took quite some time, but the new version of slrn finally has been released. It has an impressive list of changes, including the long-awaited true offline reading functionality. I also integrated a lot of patches and want to thank everyone who made a contribution. As always, you can get the source tarball from our project's download page.

[2003-08-19] New slrn FAQ available

A new, updated and more comprehensive FAQ for slrn is now available, written by Matthias Friedrich and Thomas Schultz. It will replace the files FAQ, SCORE_FAQ and slrnpull/FAQ in the next release of slrn and is based on those files, which were originally written by John E. Davis. You can read and / or download the new FAQ on our manual page. Feedback on it (to the slrn-user mailing list or to us personally) would be welcome.

For older news, please see the full history.

Where to get slrn

Getting the source code

You may obtain the latest version of slrn from our download page or via anonymous FTP. It is also available from various FTP mirrors, including: ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/pub/unix/news/slrn/ ftp://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/lang/slang/slrn/ ftp://ftp.plig.org/pub/slrn/

Getting precompiled binaries

Please note that some binary packages include patches that are often, but not always useful. If you want to be sure to have a ``vanilla'' slrn installation, you should get the source code and compile it yourself. You also need the source code if you want to apply the patches found on this page. OS version maintainer last check AmigaOS 0.9.7.4 wanted 2004-10-24 BeOS 0.9.8.0 Yasuo Yamashita 2004-10-24 Debian (stable) 0.9.7.4 Joey Hess 2004-10-24 Debian (testing) 0.9.8.1 Norbert Tretkowski 2004-10-24 Debian (unstable) 0.9.8.1 Norbert Tretkowski 2004-10-24 Debian (stable, unofficial) 0.9.8.1 Norbert Tretkowski 2004-10-24 FreeBSD 0.9.8.1 Pete Fritchman 2005-10-25 GNU/Linux (RPM search engine) 0.9.8.1 various 2004-10-24 IRIX 0.9.8.1 Gerhard Lenerz 2004-10-24 Mac OS X no longer available wanted 2006-10-28 NetBSD 0.9.8.0 various 2004-10-24 OS/2 0.9.8.0 various 2004-10-24 Solaris 0.9.8.1 Markus Mayer 2005-02-10 Windows (32bit) 0.9.8.1 wanted 2004-10-24

Our public mailing lists

There are currently two public mailing lists for slrn: slrn-announce (moderated) is used to announce new versions of slrn, important bugfixes or major changes to this website. slrn-user is open for discussion on the use, development and extensions of the slrn newsreader, as well as for suggestions for this website. You might want to post more general questions to the appropriate newsgroup, which usually has a larger audience. The postings to slrn-announce are crossposted to this list, so there is no need to subscribe to both lists.

Who maintains this page?

This page is currently maintained by four people: Thomas Schultz <tststs@gmx.de> is the new maintainer of slrn; he also does the layout of the website and provides content. Sven Guckes <guckes-slrn@guckes.net> provides content and collects large amounts of useful slrn-related information from both Usenet and the WWW. Felix Schueller <fschueller@netcologne.de> writes patches and is the author of cleanscore. Matthias Friedrich <matt@mafr.de> works on the manual and writes patches. If you want to contact us, please write to slrn-admin@lists.sourceforge.net - this is a private mailing list read by all of us (and us only). If you think your email might serve as the basis of a public discussion, consider subscribing to our public mailing list instead.