Table of Contents
Newsstar fetches news and posts it to a local server; INN, s-news and sn are supported, and it should be easy to adapt for other servers with some configuration and extra scripts. It's designed for Unix-like systems, and all the development was done on Linux.
There are already plenty of other programs to do this, but what makes newsstar special is that it can make multiple simultaneous connections, not only to one server, but to several, supporting up to 10 threads. Before fetching each article it checks that it hasn't already been downloaded by another thread or in a previous session. It can also pipeline article requests to make better use of available bandwidth.
I wrote it because a number of ISPs I have used suffer from unreliable newsfeeds. There is an excellent free server made available by news.individual.net, but it can be a bit slow at times, and using external servers uses more bandwidth. Therefore I wanted a program which could fetch whatever articles my ISP has available, but use the foreign server to avoid missing posts or getting them very late, and to do it as fast as possible.
Newsstar is distributed under the GPL. If you
are reading this file offline you should have a file called
COPYING
with details. Due to a long-term illness I am
unable to earn a living, either by programming or by any other means, so any
gifts will be much appreciated. You can use the Sourceforge/Paypal
donation scheme or see below to find
out where to send cheques or cash etc.
A quick start guide is provided, with brief instructions on how to
configure newsstar once it is installed. It starts off in the source
distribution as docs/QuickStart.in
; this is readable,
but some directory names are abstracted, enclosed in
@
symbols. After configure has
been run, docs/QuickStart
will be available, containing
the actual directory names.
If you are installing from source, and you want to use the quick start guide, read on to the building section, follow the instructions there, then read the generated guide.
If you are using a binary package, the guide should be available in
/usr/share/doc/newsstar
.