Beej's Bit Bucket

As you might know, there are about a hundred thousand million billion Linux distributions. (For those who don’t know, the “Linux” core is an operating system kernel, and people take it and build collections of software around it called “distributions“, and people install these distributions, and then, in casual conversation, call the distribution “Linux“.  All this adds up to confusion for people who don’t already know it all.)

Which distro you choose depends a lot on what type of user you are, and how dirty you want your hands to get. For many people, this is, “I’m a normal user, and I don’t want to get my hands dirty.” (I recommend the Ubuntu distribution for these folks.)  Some people might want to run a server; in that case Red Hat (or CentOS) is a good one. Of course, there are many, many good ones (I’ll put a nod here in for BSD.)

But that’s not what this post is about.

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For years, I have only used trn to read Usenet news. This is mostly because trn’s thread display was really awesome; it would display the child articles to the right of the parent, and the siblings directly below each other, forming a sparse grid of sorts. For me, this was always much easier to grok than the nested list thread display that is used basically everywhere else, which neither allows you to clearly see which articles are siblings, nor which are parents in longer threads.

Including in the Thunderbird mail client, sadly.

I use Thunderbird because I’m a Linux guy and it’s every bit as good as the next thing for my purposes. I access both my real mail and my gmail account through it, so why not Usenet news, as well?  *grits teeth*

So I plugged in all the information for my NNTP server at eternal-september.org and gave it a go.

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