First-time gnus not working

[joao]

Hi,

I have a brand new DSL connection, the machine is an IBM TinkPad 390X 
running Linux Red Hat 9. I'm running emacs 21.2.1 with gnus 5.9.0. I've 
created a minimal .gnus.el (following the gnus tutorial online):

        (setq gnus-select-method '(nntp "news.free.fr"))

and when I start gnus with the command M-x gnus, it displays a few 
messages includung "Reading active file from [...]" and then it gets 
stuck displaying

        nntp read: 17k

Sometimes, after stopping and re-starting gnus and emacs, I've managed 
to get a higher figure than 17, but I've never got the list of 
newsgroups. After some time, I interrupt with C-g.

On the other hand, using Mozilla's newsreader configured for the same 
server, everything works fine (that's how I'm posting).

Any idea how I can further investigate this ? any suggestions for 
debugging ?

Thanks,
Joao

--
joao at teaser dot fr