How I installed on win2k.
Lets get the tool you'll need first.
Download nmake.
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/Softlib/MSLFILES/nmake15.exe
Log on as Admin.
Create a dir on C. Mine is called mods and extract nmake there.
Open a console and follow the directions in the usenet install file to install the modules.
When you run CPAN the first time it will ask you to configure it. The main paths you have to set is the dir to download to which would be the dir you created.
The path to nmake.
Path to your zip utility.
Make sure you set to ask before it installs dependencies.
The rest you don't have to worry about.
3 of the modules will install with no errors 2 will build but won't install, but, we won't let that stop you.
During the install it will find some dependencies. Let it install them but remember the ones that error. One of the 3 errored on my install.
You'll know when they error.
Now you have all the modules you need.
For the ones that errored we''ll just move the files to where they need to be.
I don't remember which ones errored but to move them is pretty easy.
After you have all the modules installed. exit CPAN and command prompt cd to the dir you extracted the newnews.pl file. Once there type
perl newnews.pl
it will error but we want it too so we can see where to move the files to.
When it error you get a can't find dirname/module.pm with the path to all the perl modules. Dirname and .pm name is what we want. Mail was one that errored on mine. What you'll do is open explorer and head into C:\path\to\perl\lib dir. If you don't have the dir name it was looking for create it and then head into the build directory you setup. You will see dirs for each modules you created. Open the mail dir and in it you'll find a folder called blib open it and you'll see another folder called Mail. Open it and copy the .pm file into the mail dir you created in /perl/lib.
If you get an error can't find module.pm just copy the module out of the build dir into /lib.
Run the script again and watch for the next error. Do the same thing you did above for each error.
When you get to the error 'kill not a recognized command or batch file' all the modules are installed and working correctly.
Now the last step.
Go to
http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin
and download and install the gnu tools. You need them for the script to run. Do the net install. Install them all. This is about 16 megs of files. When it starts the install choose to install for all. That way all users can use them.
When they are installed click the cygwin icon on the desktop to get to open the bash shell.
cd /path/to/newnews.pl
then ./newnews.pl
perl will overload and you'll get a stackdump error. No problem. We only wanted to let windows know cygwin is installed. If you happen to get any module errors there don't worry about them.
Exit the shell and open windows console again. Make sure you create the forum to hold the postings before you run the script.
cd path/to/newnews.pl
then perl newnews.pl
Watch the magic happen as it grabs the news.
This will take about any hour. The install time I mean not the time it takes to get the news.
I'm sorry I couldn't be more specific about the exact files I had to move and the dirs I had to create.
Fastforward, thanks for the great hack. I should have never switched to win2k from FreeBSD. At least they let me keep Apache. Wouldn't have to go through all the trouble to get the hack running.
Bob