# Usenet News

Usenet newsgroups are forums in which you can post messages to discuss various topics: almost any subject you like (and many you don't!) can be found there. Although usenet has become less popular than it once was, because of the increasing use of web forums, &etc;, it is still a useful tool. &kde; provides a powerful usenet news reader called &knode;.

You can find &knode; in the K Menu under the Internet entry: the menu entry &knode; (News Reader) launches the program.

The main window of &knode; should now be displayed on your desktop as shown; on the first start, the settings dialog will be invoked.

Setting up &knode; &knode; after first start

&knode; after first start

## Personal settings

The first page of the settings dialog is for personal settings:

Dialog for entering personal information Entering personal information

Entering personal information

Name

- In the field Name, enter your name. This name will later appear in the newsgroups as sender, and can be seen by anyone.

  Filling out the field Name is mandatory.

Email address

- The email address you enter here will be used as sender in news articles, &ie; as actual address of the author, in conjunction with the real name (set in the field Name).

  Filling out the Email Address field is mandatory.

## Configuring the news account

Now we must tell &knode; about where we get the news from or where to send the articles to later on. In the list on the right, there is an Accounts entry; click on it and choose the Newsgroup servers tab, because we first want to configure the news account: the list of accounts is still empty.

To create a new account click on Add.... The following dialog appears:

The New Account dialog The New Account dialog

The New Account dialog

Name

- The Name field can be filled in as you like; the text you enter will later be visible in the folder view. You could, for example, enter the name of your Internet Provider; for our example we enter the name `My News Account`.

Server

- The next field is labelled Server. Unlike the field Name, what you enter here is important. The name of the news server is fixed and you should be able to get it from your Internet service provider; if you do not know the name of the news server, you should get it now: without this information you cannot read any news. If your Internet service provider doesn't own a news server you can use a public one (universities often provide public news servers.)

  For our example configuration we enter the name ``news.server.com``; you will, of course, enter the real name of your news server.

Port

- You probably will not need to change this from the default in most cases.

## Setting up the mail account

Sometimes you need to answer to the author of an article directly, without posting to the newsgroup; for example, when you want to make a very personal comment or want to correct an error. If you want to do this, select the Mail Server (SMTP) tab. The following dialog box appears:

Dialog Box for setting up the mail account Setting up the mail account

Setting up the mail account

Server

- The name (address) of your mail server as provided by your Internet service provider or system administrator; all you have to do here is enter the mail server's name in the Server field.

  In our example we enter ``mail.server.com``

Port

- Again, you probably will not need to change the Port setting.

## Related Information

- The comp.windows.x.kde newsgroup is the main user support group for &kde; on usenet. You can find other resources for getting help with &kde; in getting-help.

- Gmane provides a usenet frontend to many mailing lists, including most of the &kde; lists, so you can read them with &knode;.