# Xnews under wine

## Vancouverite

I recently setup Xnews under wine and thought others may be interested since it's working great for everything except posting binaries. Here is a screenshot in case you've never seen it before. Xnews can be downloaded from here. I am using version 6.02.16 but 5.04.25 works with this config.

1) Make an Xnews dir under ~/.wine/fake_windows/Program files

2) Download Xnews into this new dir and extract it

3) This wine config works best for me:

```
;; Xnews working config

[AppDefaults\\xnews.exe\\DllOverrides]

"comctl32"     = "native"

"commctrl"     = "native"

"riched32"     = "native"
```

4) You will need these dll files... I am using the Windows 98SE version of them

5) Execute wine Xnews.exe and configure as normal

Performance has been excellent for me (Athlon 1.4) with multiple simultaneous downloads and posting/lurking.

----------

## smokeslikeapoet

I've been using Xnews in a Wine environment for some time now and it works great. I really wish there was a GTK clone for Xnews, but until then, Xnews is the best way to download newsgroup binaries period.

----------

## zenz

Totally agree w/ the post above me!

I tried dozens of linux newsreaders but they all sucked (frequent freezes, very slow at sorting, etc, etc)

I tried running it w/wine a while ago but the images won't display at all.  Hopefully your configuration will make it work:)

----------

## sKewlBoy

I have tried Xnews and I prefer GrabIt, if using wine.

But Pan is more than enough to download binaries from newsgroups. And the fact of not needing the memory-eater wine(x), just makes me forget some of its lacking features.

It's in the portage tree, in case you haven't tried it yet.

----------

## zenz

I have tried Pan:(  It sorts and loads articles extremely slowly; even xnews under wine is a lot faster.  Also it freezes and crashes on me all the time.  Moreover, I really think the task manager is broken, as I could never items to cancel properly.

On the other hand, maybe they fixed all those bugs.  I'll give it another try when I boot up my Gentoo (it's been a while  :Embarassed:  ).

I'll try GrabIt too.  Thanks for the suggestions.

----------

## Hyper_Eye

 *smokeslikeapoet wrote:*   

> I've been using Xnews in a Wine environment for some time now and it works great. I really wish there was a GTK clone for Xnews, but until then, Xnews is the best way to download newsgroup binaries period.

 

I think I would rather have a QT clone. I am a Linux GUI developer and I develop in both GTK+ and QT. Right now Qt is definitely shaping up to be the better widget set. Anyway... if I wasn't already working on a project at the moment I would think about making an Xnews clone for Linux. I am sure someone will do it.

----------

## zenz

I can't seem to be able to get pictures to display in Xnews.  They download, but it just says

begin 644 something.jpg

Attachingment decoded: something.jpg

`

end

Anyone has any ideas?

Thanks in advance

----------

## worknman

 *Quote:*   

> but until then, Xnews is the best way to download newsgroup binaries period.

 

Geez, have you ever tried Newsleecher? No idea if it runs under Wine, but it's a helluva lot better than Xnews  :Smile:  Another one that definitely runs under Wine is Newsbin (www.newsbin.com) - they even have a special version just for that purpose.

Of course, neither one of these are free and I suspect that many Linux users might be opposed to actually paying for software, but if you download a lot of binaries, the time you save would be more than worth the asking price.

----------

## ohmster

To get Xnews working in wine under Linux, install the latest version of wine, use the newest version of Xnews. No need to go crazy over this, use your package manager to update your stuff and that should be good enough.

You will need some files from a working Windows XP installation. Put them in your xnews folder and use winecfg to set these libraries as "native". I got Mike Dee to help me with this and this was his reply. I was trying to follow the old instructions and to make xnews work under win98, which I don't have by installing dcom98. Here is what Mike had to say:

OK, I now have inline JPEGs showing in an Xnews window under Wine.

I say forget the decom98 file, stick with DLLs that are relevent to 

your current OS.

The required DLLs for the JPEGs are "OLE32.DLL" and "OLEAUT32.DLL". I 

moved these into the Xnews folder.

In winecfg, my current Libraries used with Xnews are as follows:

comctl32 (native, builtin)

ole32 (native, builtin)

oleaut32 (native, builtin)

riched20 (native, builtin)

riched32 (native, builtin)

I'll run this combination for a day or so to see if any unknown issues 

arise. But hey it's a good feeling getting it to work  :Smile: 

-- 

dee

I did just what Mike Dee said and you know what? He was right as rain. Xnews now runs in wine just the same as it does in Windows. The only bug I have found so far is that if you are downloading multiple part binary files and then go to another virtual workspace, Xnews will disappear and then refuse to run again. This can be fixed by going to the Linux directory /tmp and deleting the folder ".wine-500" (Or whatever your user ID number is instead of the "500". cd to the directory /tmp and delete this directory and all of it's sub directories with:

rm - rf .wine-500 (Or whatever your UID is)

Now Xnews will run again in all of it's Windows like glory. Not slow, not buggy, it just rocks with inline binary images too! I use Fedora Linux 6 but came to post this here because this is where Luu Tran has decided to send people wishing to run Xnews in Linux on his web page here:

http://xnews.newsguy.com/

So that is it, enjoy Xnews in Linux with wine and have a blast!   :Smile: 

~ohmster

----------

## GenMike

ohmster How do we get the files from a windows xp installation if we're using windows 7?

----------

