» How to use tin to read the openSUSE Forums

The openSUSE forums also support the NNTP protocol (usually referred to as "news"). There are plenty of GUI news readers out there (thunderbird, knode, pan, ...), but as I'm using mutt to read my emails as well as irssi for IRC in screen sessions (in urxvt, I wanted a console based NNTP client for that as well. (No, I don't use lynx or w3m for web browsing, I'm not a masochist ;).)

Hence I installed trn.

Here is how to set it up to access the openSUSE forums with it:

1. Obviously, first install trn:
   zypper install trn
2. then run rtin once, which will give you an error message and exit, but that will create its configuration file tree in ~/.tin:
   rtin
3. next, edit the configuration file ~/.tin/newsrctable and add the following line:
   forums.opensuse.org /home/XXX/.tin/foo foo
   (where you replace /home/XXX with your actual home directory)
   If you are not fluent with text editors, you can also simply execute the following command from a shell (just copy/paste it):
   echo "forums.opensuse.org $HOME/.tin/foo foo" >> ~/.tin/newsrctable
4. now we can actually run rtin to connect to the openSUSE forums:
   rtin -a -g foo
   (note that the -a flag turns on color support, and -g foo tells rtin to connect to the server we configured as "foo" in ~/.tin/newsrctable)
5. you are now greeted with an (almost) empty screen: press the y key (yank in/out) to get a list of all the forums in order to subscribe to those that are of interest to you: simply use the arrow keys to scroll the list and press the s key (subscribe) to subscribe those you want to follow