9: Printing

8: Accessing Information

8.B: Netscape

§ 8.C: News

Newsgroups are a useful feature of the Internet. Here people with similar interests exchange ideas, information and sometimes arguments. The (somewhat coded) names of newsgroups often tell you what their interests are. If a news group name seems interesting, just read some of their news to get the full story.

Remember that information on the internet is not necessarily reliable (after all, you just finished putting your home page on line). Nonetheless, newsgroups can be a good source of information, especially about computer subjects. If you feel stimulated to post to a newsgroup, please be certain to follow the proper "nettiquite".

There are many ways to read news on a Unix machine. These include the Netscape browser, the emacs editor and the readnews command rn:

• To access the news features of Netscape, pull down the Window menu and selectNetscape News.
• In emacs, pull down the Tools menu and selectRead Net News.
• To start the read news utility (which may not be available on all machines) get to a prompt and enter >rn [return]. In the Physics Department, this works only on goophy and daphy.

Both Netscape and emacs have additional help via a "Help" button, and you can get help for rn by using the man command which will be discussed in a later section.

9: Printing

8: Accessing Information

8.B: Netscape