WTF is Xnews?
it is a News Reader. WTF is a News Reader?
On the internet there is a place called Usenet. Which is where you will find Newsgroups. Newsgroups are like these forums, a little. There is no need to register or crap like that. YOu just read and post if you like.
I have always known you could get Files from these newsgroups but never really looked into it because i have always had Kazaa. But then when i was looking into Dreamcast crap i needed to get the games from Newsgroups. Here is where i was pointed to Xnews.
You have to know your News Server address which is giving to you by your Internet Service Provider. Mine is with Road Runner here in the valley so my Server address is news-server.rgv.rr.com .
When you first run Xnews it is going to ask for this info as well as an email address. The only thing you need is the news server. everything else you can make up or use whatever. I just mainly download crap so i really dont care what my name is going to be when I post.
Downloading files from Xnews is different but yet easy at the same time. There is a 250kb limit to the size of a file that can be posted to a news group. So what people do is split up this files and post them in splits of 250kb. Make sense? Prolly not.
Say you want to download an MP3 from a newsgroup. Xnews first downloads the posts or messages from the Newsgroup, then it threads them. By threading i mean it puts them all posts that should be together, together. I am sure it more technical then that, but thats what it does!
. Now when these MP3s are broken up to meet the size limit sometimes parts of the files are lost or have not showed up on the server. How do you know if its all there or not? Two ways. One there is a little blue Square Cube in from of the message with the MP3 in it. If this cube is all in one piece and a light color blue it is good to go. If it is not it will be missing a corner and be a darker blue. Another way to tell is to look towards the end of the name of the Post. it will tell you how many files it has been broken up to like so [25/25]. This means that there is 25 of the 25 needed files. If it is missing 5 files it will be like so [20/25]. So you skip it or come back later to see if the missing parts have showed up.
Now to download here is what you do. If there are a lot of files you want to download then you can do them one at a time or have Xnews do it one after the other, called Queueing. To queue you highlight the one you want to download, then hit the Space bar. You should see a number show up. Once you know what you want you ready to Download. It is not called Downloading though. It is called Decoding. On the bottom of the screen you will see an Icon that looks like a Cube with a chunk missing. Put your mouse over it and you will see it says Decode. Hit the button and tell it where you want your files to go, the default is xnews/downloads/. Now you will a bunch numbers flying in the bottom of the screen. Its done when it says " ## Files decoded", if it was 3 MP3s it will say "3 files decoded".
i will post some screen shots later tonite. I must go to work. I also want to talk about downloading BIG arse FILES from Xnews. Thats tricky.
anyway, you get Xnews off of my site here:
http://www.digisal.com/apps/xnews.zipor from here:
http://xnews.newsguy.com/but its kind of slow from there so the creator asks us users to post up on our sites to save his bandwidth.
--Sal-
