If you wish to build the News images from source code rather than using distributed binaries, you will also need a C compiler. This is strongly recommended, not only because it's in general a bad practice to run programs on your system when you haven't been able to build copies you trust, but also because it's necessary for such things as site-specific modifications or incorporation of patches into News. (Actually, recompiling is necessary in any case if you don't have TGV's Multinet TCP/IP stack, because the version of News.Exe distributed in the News_Dist Zip file is linked against the Multinet shareable socket library.) The C source code in News is written to be compiled by VAXC, DECC, or gcc without modification. (Note to gcc users: By default, NewsBuild.Com disables the '-fbuiltin' optimization, because of a bug in gcc versions before 2.6.3 which could cause corruption of memory when memcpy() was called. If you're using gcc 2.6.3 or later, you can remove the '-fno-builtin' from the /Cc1_Options value.) Gcc is only available for VAX systems as of this writing, and can be obtained by anonymous ftp from ftp.gnu.ai.mit.edu, or other GNU ftp mirror sites. It takes a little work to install, but is a very nice compiler, and the price is right, especially if you can't stretch your budget to cover VAXC or DECC.
In addition, if you plan to exchange news with other sites, you'll need some means of communicating with these sites. If you only expect to exchange a small amount of information, you can do it via mail, though this rapidly becomes inefficient as news traffic increases. For higher volume exchanges between systems with intermittent or low bandwidth connections, you may want to use UUCP (a VMS version is available from DECUS) or a similar file exchange protocol. In the end News doesn't much care about the means by which items are transported, so if you want, you can communicate with other sites by mailing them tapes, though this is rather slow.
If you have continuous high-speed links to the sites with which you exchange news, the News distribution includes tools to handle this exchange via DECnet or TCP connections, using the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), and standard for exchanging news between sites. If you're interested in the details, NNTP is described in RFC977, which is provided in the News_Doc ZIP file, but you don't need to know the details to run News. For most sites, TCP connections are preferable to DECnet connections, since they involve less overhead, but some sites may want to take advantage of capabilities which DECnet provides but TCP/IP lacks (e.g. user authentication). These configuration choices are described in more detail in the later sections of this manual. As of this writing, News includes support for the following TCP/IP packages:
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