Re: Basic gnus stuff

[Joel Reicher]

Fredrik Tolf <fredrik@dolda2000.com> writes:

> First of all, how is one _supposed_ to find existing groups to which
> one can subscribe? I managed to, but I cannot imagine that it's
> supposed to be right. I had to set the `gnus-read-active-file' to `t'
> (rather than `some') to get gnus to fetch the group list at all (while
> watching the NNTP traffic in Ethereal to even know what gnus was
> doing). Surely, this must be too basic an operation to have to change
> variable defaults to do? Or is gmane, by any chance, not fully
> compatible with gnus?

You might be mistaking a usenet issue for a gnus issue.

Usenet, in general, has no wonderful way of discovering what groups
exist. Either you know the name of the group already, in which case in
gnus you can "jump" (key is 'j') directly to it, or you don't know the
name of the group in which case you must perform some kind of search
on the entire active file.

In gnus there are two ways to get the active file. One is the
keystroke 'A A' in the group buffer, the other is to go to the server
buffer and then to "browse" a server.

> Then, when I've subscribed to a new group, such as
> gmane.linux.gentoo.user, I see a new article count of 182770, and when
> I try to select the group, gmane asks how many articles I want to
> fetch, defaulting to 182770, which I figure is going to take about to
> the heat-death of the universe to execute. Of course, I can select a
> much lesser number manually, but it still re-asks me every subsequent
> time as well. How do I mark all articles as read and wait for new
> articles to arrive?

Please read

http://gnus.org/manual/gnus_16.html#SEC16

and in particular

http://gnus.org/manual/gnus_24.html#SEC24

or the equivalent info pages in emacs.

> Third, I tried to use nnslashdot to read /., but it complains about
> not finding w3. Which seems agreeable, seeing how w3 is not installed
> on my system (but isn't it supposed to be installed with emacs?). So I
> go about doing that, but it doesn't seem to exist. I download the
> source, but upon trying to configure it, it complains about some URL
> functions in emacs being missing. What's up? Has w3, and by extension
> nnslashdot, been deprecated?  Btw., I use GNU Emacs 21.4.1.

Sorry, can't help you. I can only say that w3 does not come with
emacs, and it's quite separate to gnus too.

Cheers,

        - Joel