Download FreeNews 1.13 now
FreeNews 1.03 has a serious bug, and has now been withdrawn. If you have it, you should upgrade.
If you have downloaded FreeNews 1.11 beta or 1.12a alpha, then you should Upgrade immediately as these versions had some serious bugs.
All groups that are selected as "full fetch" will be downloaded as per version 1.03; groups selected as "header-only" will only fetch the headers of messages in those groups. This is useful for reading the odd message from a high-traffic group. Once you've looked at the header in Messenger, TTFN or manually, you can put the message id in a new file "FetchMe", and FreeNews will request that article in full on its next transfer.
If you're using the latest version of Newsbase (0.58), and Messenger newsreader, together with the new freenews 1.10+ transport, then selecting "Fetch body" will automatically add the relevant message-id to the FetchMe file. Versions Newsbase before 0.57 can be persuaded to work, but I have only aimed to get header-only code working correctly with version 0.58.
The SparkFS archive below is a full release of FreeNews, and can be installed over any previous version. Note that if you use Acornet, you should also install the 0.06 version of SyslogD (included).
Download FreeNews 1.13 now
If you have downloaded FreeNews 1.11 beta or 1.12a alpha, then you should Upgrade immediately as these versions had some serious bugs.
If configured (as not all servers have to support it), FreeNews will use the date/time from the server rather than the internal clock when fetching news. Again optionally, you can choose to use this clock to keep the internal clock up-to-date. This feature should be used with care if you constantly switch between servers.
The SparkFS archive below is a full release of FreeNews, and can be installed over any previous version. Note that if you use Acornet, you should also install the 0.06 version of SyslogD (included).
Download FreeNews 1.14 now (141K)
or alternatively,
Unfortunately, part of the FreeNews Newsbase transport (as shipped with versions of NewsBase up to 0.57b) was compiled with incompatible options... and resulted in an error, and the inability to add new groups to the list that FreeNews downloads.
You can now download (Thu 14th November 1996) a patch to the transport. Simply drop it over your existing copy of !Newsbase to upgrade.
Download StrongARM patch now
If you can afford a StrongARM, get one. The compilation of FreeNews speeded up from 1 minute 24 seconds on my old ARM710 to an incredible 14 seconds on the StrongARM! I was impressed!
Last Updated
Sun 13th April 1997.
