With the recent brouhaha over Google stopping its Reader service, a number of websites published articles on traditional desktop based RSS readers. One of them Newsbeuter caught my attention because of it's screenshot . It was white text against a black background. Ah! A shell based newsreader. How quaint! I decided to give it a spin.

It turned out that there were packages for debian already but not Mageia . Even pbone did not have it. A quick download of the source code followed by tar xvf laid open the source code. Running make gave an error so I ran the config.sh file. It complained of several missing packages on Mageia 2.0. Here we go again...

[root@localhost ]# urpmi libsqlite3-devel libcurl4-devel libxml2-devel libjson-devel libopenssl-devel

Running config.sh complained about the missing stfl package. The README file helpfully pointed to the website where I could download the stfl code. unzip followed. README wanted the wide version of the curses library. So,

[root@localhost ]# urpmi libncursesw-devel

After this everything compiled fine and make install went through fine with just one minor glitch. I switched back to newsbeuter and ran config.sh but it still complained about stfl headers missing. Went back to README of stfl. No help there. Now what? I visited the old standby pbone . There was a rpm for Fedora 18 available and I tried installing it. No luck since it obviously had other Fedora 18 dependencies. Oh well. So I tried to open the rpm and see what it was trying to install.

[root@localhost ]# rpm2cpio stfl-devel-0.21-19.fc18.i686.rpm | cpio -idmv

Turns out it tried to install only three files. Since I already had each of them in the stfl code that I had downloaded and compiled earlier, it was easy to replicate what the rpm was doing.

[root@localhost ]# cp stfl-0.22/stfl.h /usr/include/
[root@localhost ]# cp stfl-0.22/stfl.pc /usr/lib/pkgconfig/
[root@localhost ]# cp stfl-0.22/libstfl.so.0.22 /usr/lib/
[root@localhost ]# cd /usr/lib; ln -s libstfl.so.0.22 libstfl.so; ldconfig

Go back to newsbeuter directory. make and make install . That's it. Instructions on how to use newsbeuter is available on its website and elsewhere .