This is tin (Threaded Internet News), a fast (usually) and
easy text-mode USENET reader.  The last OS/2 port of tin was
*ten* years ago, and it's improved a lot since then.

This version is compiled to work both with NNTP news servers
and a local news spool, but I haven't tested the latter.

Compared to the last OS/2 port of tin, this version:

     - uses ANSI screen color (disabled by default)
     - permits tagging of multiple articles for batch download and
          decoding
     - supports BASE64, UUENCODE and yEnc binary encoding
     - will automatically save unread articles to disk for offline
          reading
     - optionally uses Perl-compatible regular expressions for
          article filtering


REQUIREMENTS:

     - EMX runtime libraries v0.9d
          http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/dev/emx/v0.9d/emxrt.zip

     - ncurses 5.3
          http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/dev/util/ncurses-5.3-os2.zip

     - mman.dll (included)

     - gcc321m.dll (included)

INSTALLATION:

Unzip this file into a directory so that the bin/ directory
will be in your path, either be X:\EMX or $UNIXROOT, e.g.

     unzip tin-1.7.0-os2.zip -d c:/emx

Unzip ncurses to the parent of that directory, e.g.

     unzip ncurses-5.3-os2 -d c:/

Several environment variables *must* be set for tin to work.
The most important are

    TERMINFO_DIRS=c:/emx/share/terminfo (possibly)

    TERM= ('mono' is a good choice for tin so it can use its own
         colors)

    USER=login.name -- tin will attempt to use information in
         $ETC/passwd if it exists

    HOME=x:/your/home/directory, where tin will create the .newsrc
         file

    NAME=Your Name Here (if not in the passwd file)

    EDITOR= your preferred (text-mode) editor

    NNTPSERVER= (if you're using NNTP, as seems quite likely)

See the ENVIRONMENT section of the tin (1) man page for more.

Two versions of the executable are included:  one compiled for i386
and one for i686 (Pentium II, Athlon, etc.)  Traditionally, on Unix
systems, tin installs itself as 'tin' for local newsreading, and
'rtin' for NNTP-only connections.  If you prefer that, just rename the
file to RTIN.EXE.  Otherwise, you'll have to use the -r command-line
switch.

I've also whipped up a little REXX script that will start tin in a
new, large-ish window with the name of your news server in the title
bar.

This is just an attempt at porting, since no one else has seemed
interested.  I make no guarantees, and if any of the real programmers
out there can polish it up (esp.  support for current versions of
gettext and libiconv), I'd be delighted.  The source as I modified it
for OS/2 is included in this zip file; the original is at

     ftp://ftp.tin.org/pub/news/clients/tin/

I plan to submit diffs to tin.org, but haven't done so yet.

Questions/comments welcome, however.


-Mike Forester
forester@panix.com
4 Sept. 2003



