1. General questions about slrn

1.1 What is slrn?

Slrn (``slang read news'') is a Usenet newsreader that runs in text mode on various Unix and Unix-like operating systems (including Linux), Windows, OS/2, BeOS, MacOS X and VMS.

It supports scoring rules to highlight, sort or kill articles to make reading news more efficient. Furthermore it is highly customizable, allows free key-bindings and can be extended using the slang macro language. Offline reading is possible using either slrnpull (shipped with slrn) or a local newsserver like leafnode or INN.

1.2 Where can I download slrn?

The latest source distribution of slrn is available via HTTP from <http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/slrn/>. A list of mirrors as well as links to precompiled binaries can be found at <http://slrn.sourceforge.net/#sect_getslrn>.

If you run Linux, your distribution probably contains a slrn package that might not offer the latest version, but is more or less ``ready to go''.

Additional resources are available at slrn's official homepage.

1.3 Where is slrn's documentation?

The source distribution contains a lot of documentation; on Unix-like systems, it is likely to be installed somewhere in /usr/share/doc or /usr/doc. It contains manpages (type man slrn at the command prompt), the Slrn Reference Manual (manual.txt) and several other useful resources like a sample slrnrc (configuration) file.

If you are new to slrn, please make sure to read the file FIRST_STEPS. It should get you started.

If you cannot find this documentation on your system, you can browse it online at http://slrn.sourceforge.net/docs/.

1.4 Are there any mailing lists and/or newsgroups about slrn?

If you have general questions about slrn that are not covered by its documentation, please make use of the appropriate newsgroups or mailing list rather than writing to the maintainer directly:

The appropriate newsgroup for questions about slrn is news.software.readers. There is also a German speaking equivalent ( de.comm.software.newsreader).

Slrn-user is a mailing list for discussion of the use, development and extension of slrn. You can subscribe to it through the web interface at <http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/slrn-user>.

To keep track of slrn's development, simply subscribe to slrn-announce. It is a low-traffic moderated list that informs you about new releases, important bugfixes or major changes to the website. The subscription address is <http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/slrn-announce>. All announcements are also mailed to slrn-user, so there is no need to read both lists.

1.5 slrn appears quite stable. Why don't you call it version 1.0?

The main reason for the sub-1.0 version number is the poor handling of different character sets. I think that a modern newsreader should support Unicode, but we have to wait for slang 2 until we can really include this. So, you'll see slrn 1.0 as soon as the new version of the slang library is out, slrn is ported to it and running reasonably stable.