Confusing at first for a Newbie!
Baby steps
I am the kind of person that tends to take my time with anything that is new to myself but not necessarily new for thousands of others who I am sure have jumped on board to new things soon as they find out about them. Partly because I do have some cognitive problems, but also because I like to read and learn things at my own pace. I often start slowly and work up to the final answer, usually working it out by myself purely by reading great technical type forums and searching google extensively
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Providers
To access the world of Usenet you need to sign up with a provider that gives you access to the servers, I don't have a credit card nor want one, this was my first sticking point, after all everyone has a credit card these days don't they, well the banks would like us all to sign up to the scam that is the CC world of high finance, can't let those poor bank managers and their families go hungry, can we?
When I first started looking at usenet the providers that looked the goods they didn't offer PayPal payments.....bugger. After about six months I thought I should revisit the usenet providers and see if anything had changed, guess what, they had, well the one in particular that I wanted to go through Astraweb now accepted PayPal payments. Now it was time to look into this usenet phenomena once again.
Linux Client
The standard Linux client for usenet seems to be Pan, well on Ubuntu it's the first one that seems to come up when you do a repo search for the word "usenet" knowing Linux apps there are probably heaps more of them. So I installed Pan and did some reading up about it, ya know even though I got it all set up and working and just didn't seem very intuitive to me anyway, though it does seem to work very well, I just wanted something that was "easier". I thought about installing a Winbloze app under wine but I only use windose programs if there is absolutely nothing else of what you want in the Ubuntu Repos. Anyway I gave up on usenet for another six months, I had to have another think about it all.
Luckily my Astraweb credit has no time limit on how long it takes to use it.
Searching for what you want!
Now this is where google just can't help, yes sad to say but it has virtually no relevance to usenet as a search tool. While reading a third party forum that was specific for the ISP I use, there was a discussion on usenet, this discussion was the key that I had been missing.
When I found the Key I needed, it was then a matter of revisiting google (google helped here) search to find a good client for linux, after a brief search I happened on SABnzbd + a wonderful browser based usenet client.
The best Client for me
From the website
"What is SABnzbd?
SABnzbd is a free/open-source cross-platform binary newsreader written in Python.
It simplifies the process of downloading from Usenet dramatically, thanks to its friendly web-based user interface and advanced built-in post-processing options that automatically verify, repair, extract and clean up posts downloaded from Usenet. SABnzbd also has a fully customizable user interface, and offers a complete API for third-party applications to hook into."
For me this was/is the holy grail of usenet clients from my very limited knowledge of course, perfect for me though!
SABnzbd is a cross platform client that also runs on Mac's and Windows, so if I sell my sould to the devil one day (windows) or I win the lotto (buy an Apple Mac) I will always have a client I am familiar with hopefully ;o)
The Keys to the Vault
Newzleech this is a great site, more will become apparent when you use it in conjunction with the following site as well.
Do a google search for simply NZBMatrix
With the second link you can see a list of what's available in the binaries groups, you want to get NZB's keep that in mind. The first site is free so find the file on the second site (or pay $10 lifetime membership) then do a search with the file name on the first site.
Look for the biggest file you can find of the type of file you want, sometimes you will see many files that are single files and lots of irrelevant files, look for the file size that looks about right. When you find what you want, check the box and go to the bottom of the list and hit the button "Get NZB" there will be lots of trial and error but we all go through that and I am sure that I still have much to learn as well.
Once you have the NZB saved in a folder, oh I don't know maybe call the folder "NZB's" then open your client, in my case SABnzbd starts automatically (I like to be ready to pounce) and add the NZB you just downloaded, seriously the rest becomes quite apparent as to what happens and what you do. Just give it a try and experiment.
SABnzbd does it pretty much all for you, creates Category folders when you choose the category for the file, it UNRARS and decompresses pars and archives all for you, pars seem to be less relevant when you get NZBs, I don't download them, but as I say I am no Guru a few days before I wrote this I was just like you, of course it helps if you always downloaded your Linux Distros through Bit Torrents you should have no problems with the usenet "system" when you at least get the hints that I have hopefully provided for you on my path to Usenet goodness ;o)
SABnzbd has a scheduler and great easy to understand config options, don't go crazy changing things just start out slowly, you'll get the hang of it very quickly! Obviously you can also run it remotely from another Computer, to me it seems to be the perfect Usenet Client for Linux and others.
More Links
(Unofficial) Ubuntu repository for SABnzbd+
http://forums.sabnzbd.org/index.php?topic=387.0
Source File Download Page
All about "Usenet" (Wikipedia)
