Could anyone recommend a good feed reader for Linux? I need to be able to organize my ~160 feeds in folders, read an entire feed or set of feeds without having to click incessantly, and get already-read items out of the way.

Since I wrote that, tagging has replaced folders, I have over 400 feeds, and I’ve adopted Newsbeuter for reading my feeds. It’s a great console-based feed reader that lets me zip through my feeds with vim-like keybindings. I’ve included my config file at the bottom of this post.

I’ve found it most useful to tag my feeds by how often they update. I’ve found five broad categories:

Personal

Feeds related to my projects and the blogs of friends and family. I want to read all of these several times per day.

Daily

Mostly comics and commentators that update 3-7 times per week, but usually only once per day. These are time-insensitive entertainment, so I can let them build up for a few days or weeks before I go through them.

Irregular

This is the vast bulk of my feeds and update between once per week and once per year. When I like a blog and enjoy reading its archive, I’ll follow it to keep an eye out for new posts. I could read this as infrequently as every month.

Noisy

I only follow a handful of blogs that update multiple times per day and I’ll read them every day or few days, skimming most of the items. Usually any blog that updates this frequently has a pretty lousy signal-to-noise ratio, so they don’t tend to stay in my feedlist for more than a month or two at a time before I get fed up.

Aggregators

Social news sites, usually I read them once in the morning and once in the evening. Sometimes more often if I’m procrastinating.

I’ve found it far more useful to tag my feeds by these reading habits than by their topic. I can sit down to read whatever my current time and attention allow rather than wading through all of it at once.

There’s only one feature I’d like from Newsbeuter. When I travel, I may be offline for several days and only have a few minutes of connectivity when I do get on. I’d like to leave a script of some kind running on a shell account somewhere to collect feed items to quickly spool to me when I’m online. Alternately, I’d be happy running newsbeuter on a remote host if I could still open tabs in my local browser as usual.

Here’s that config file:

# no automatic reloading
refresh-on-startup no
auto-reload no
reload-time 360 # minutes

# reloading
reload-threads 4
reload-only-visible-feeds no
show-read-feeds no
download-retries 4

# notification
notify-screen yes
notify-xterm yes

# storage
max-items 200

# external programs - ff is a firefox wrapper
browser ff

# display
article-sort-order date-desc
feedlist-format "%S%n %11u %t"
articlelist-format "%D %f %?T?;%-17T; ?%t"
datetime-format %m-%d
color background white black
color listnormal white black
color listfocus black white
color info black white
color article white black

# interface
confirm-exit yes
bind-key k up
bind-key j down
bind-key O open-in-browser-and-mark-read

1. By default, only root will be able to play with your new scanner. Run sudo addgroup `whoami` scanner. Log out and back in, and you’ll be able to scan without being root.
2. Download the iscan and iscan-plugin-gt rpms from the provider. By playing with the URLs on the file I was able to find version 2.5.0, but I don’t know that you need it or why the page hasn’t been updated.
3. Run:

    
   $ sudo alien iscan-2.3.0-1.c2.i386.rpm
   $ sudo alien iscan-plugin-gt-s600-2.0.0-1.c2.i386.rpm
   $ sudo apt-get install iscan_2.3.0-1_i386.deb
   $ sudo apt-get install iscan-plugin-gt-s600_2.0.0-2_i386.deb

4. Run sane-find-scanner to see your scanner detected, and scanimage -L to hear it whir a little as sane checks that it can command it.

That’s all the setup I had to do. You should now be able to use xsane or Gimp to grab images off your scanner. I don’t know how to make the buttons on the scanner do anything, even xev reported nothing.

If you have problems, you should post on the SANE mailing list, not here, because I don’t really know anything about SANE and can’t help you.

• Windows Vista Starter Edition
• Windows Vista Home Basic Edition
• Windows Vista Home Premium Edition
• Windows Vista Professional Edition
• Windows Vista Small Business Edition
• Windows Vista Enterprise Edition
• Windows Vista Ultimate Edition

There’s two answers to this question, one for the geeks and one for everyone else.

If you’re not a geek

Buy an Apple computer with OS X. Seriously. You’d have to buy a new computer for Vista anyways (this applies to you even if you bought a computer this week). The Intel-based macs are excellent machines, OS X is easy, reliable, and can do everything you want do with your computer. You can even set them up to run XP alongside OS X for that one last program you can’t get your files out of.

If you don’t want OS X because you’re a gamer, you don’t want Vista either. Just get a mac and a Wii.

If you’re a geek

You want Ubuntu Linux. It’s darn easy, it’s great on laptops, and you can make it sit up and do tricks. I don’t need to elaborate on this one: you know Linux is the hands-down best OS for geeks, and Ubuntu is a great distribution.

Either way…

I’m not going to be supporting Windows Vista for my friends and family. I’ve limped along with a little XP knowledge, but I’ve never used it for anything but testing and a few games so I’ve never really learned my way around it. I’ll put up with Vista professionally, but I won’t be able to help you solve the problems you’ll have with it.

And you will have problems. It’s built to have problems: the anti-piracy protections will have it lowering image and sound quality, turning off features, and disabling itself altogether if it decides you’re doing anything hinky, whether or not you are. Editing your home movies may trigger it to think you’re editing Hollywood’s movies, and it’ll lock down on you. You don’t want a product that’s defective by design anywhere near your important files.

* Yes, I’ve used Cygwin. It’s good, but awkward.

The ? indicates that support is added by a random freeware utility rather than built into the OS, so who knows how well it’ll work. Yeah, XP and OS X both suck for filesystem support.

The general plan looks like OS X and XP will have ~10G partitions with their native HFS+ and NTFS. Linux will get a ~10G ext3 root partition and the rest of the disk space will go to a large ext3 partition for /home. I’ll spend my time in Linux, booting to XP and OS X mostly just to test, so their ext3 support needs to not suck or I’ll have to create a FAT 32 scratch partition just to pass files around (and scratch any hope of using my svn repos).

Just to add another wrinkle, I plan on using TrueCrypt to encrypt all my private data so I’m not 100% screwed if I lose my laptop, just like 15% screwed. TrueCrypt runs on Linux and XP and can encrypt entire filesystem partitions or virtual disks (which exist as files on existing partitions). So while I’d like to have a big ext3-formatted TrueCrypt-protected /home partition, that’d leave out OS X.

Anyone have a better plan? Anyone else with a triple-boot setup care to share lessons learned?

At the moment I’m using rawdog, a painfully simple aggregator that just dumps all the latest items into a local HTML page. It has no features, but at least it doesn’t actively get in my way.

I’ve tried all the Firefox plugins and they’re either very buggy (Habari Xenu, NewsFox), immature (Fizzle), or too painful to use (Pluck, Wizz). It’s a shame, because they all at least integrated well with the browser, probably better than I can imagine a separate program doing.

Web-based services like NewsGator are right out because I read a number of feeds that I need to keep private because they’re not-yet-launched projects, friends’ personal blogs, bug feeds from apps I’m supporting, and so on. I know they all have privacy options, but I’m unwilling to chance anything going wrong with other people’s private data.

So, any ideas?