I’ve been look­ing for a nice, stand­alone feed reader for Linux recently, and I think I’ve finally found one that fits the bill.

Spoiler: I’m using Lif­erea. Read on for why.

There’s the sta­ple appli­ca­tions, as always, which peo­ple seem to leap at almost on impulse, are feed read­ers such as Straw, Syn­di­ga­tor or RSSOwl. And, for some rea­son, I’ve cho­sen none of these.

Straw

Straw looked good, but for the whole GNOME and Py*insert exten­sion here* depen­dence thing… I’m cur­rently run­ning KDE on the desk­top, and whilst it would have run fine, I’d rather not be tied down. That, and I’m uncer­tain as to how it would ren­der con­tent. The main thing was my dis­like of Python exten­sions, though.

Syn­di­ga­tor

This, I glanced at fairly seri­ously, but the depen­dency mon­sters over­ran my utopian world, and as such it was left in the pile of refuse that is my appli­ca­tion down­loads folder (2.9GB, not includ­ing var­i­ous oper­at­ing sys­tem images which also reside on my hard drive, since about the start of this year). I think it was whing­ing about Perl or some­thing, so I slammed the door on it before it had even fin­ished speak­ing. Doo bee doo.

RSSOwl

This is an inter­est­ing ket­tle of fish. It looks most excel­lent, but, again for plat­form rea­sons, I chose not to use it. I’m pretty ter­ri­ble in this regard, actu­ally. If a prod­uct is coded in Java, I’m sorry, but I can’t afford to use it. Not because of any finan­cial cost, or because of any­thing against the soft­ware itself — it’s just that the Java VM seems to swal­low RAM like four-wheel drive cars from Sydney’s North Shore swal­low fos­sil fuels… and I can’t afford that much RAM.

I’d be inter­ested to explore this one at some point in the future, however.

So, why did I chose to go with Liferea?

Lif­erea

It’s eas­i­est just to quote their own web­site to intro­duce this reader, so that’s what I’ll do.

Lif­erea is an abbre­vi­a­tion for Linux Feed Reader. It is a news aggre­ga­tor for online news feeds. It sup­ports a num­ber of dif­fer­ent feed for­mats includ­ing RSS/RDF, CDF, Atom, OCS, and OPML. There are many other news read­ers avail­able, but these oth­ers are not avail­able for Linux or require many extra libraries to be installed. Lif­erea tries to fill this gap by cre­at­ing a fast, easy to use, easy to install news aggre­ga­tor for GTK/GNOME.

Cool. I think it scores well on all those scores. The source archive gave me grief, but started co-operating after I installed some devel­op­ment libraries… that said, the — I’ll say “interesting” — file struc­tur­ing sys­tem employed by SuSE 9.1 made errors crop up from var­i­ous places dur­ing the actual build. Which sucked. So, I got lazy, and went off to grab a nice shiny pre-packaged SuSE RPM files from their Source­Forge project page. Snazzy, hey?

And then it installed. Sexy. Easy to use. Famil­iar inter­face (akin to Ximian/Novell Evo­lu­tion). Search­ing. Fold­ers. Can use Mozilla, Fire­fox, Opera, Netscape and Kon­queror out of the box, as well as sup­port­ing open­ing links in a new tab (yes, I know it’s a fairly sim­ple com­mand switch… that doesn’t mean many prod­ucts USE it!). Choice of Mozilla or GtkHTML as inter­nal ren­der­ing engine. Dock­ing in the KDE tool­bar… and this is a GTK/GNOME prod­uct! It’s very cool. Thumbs up to the devel­op­ers, who sug­gest that those

inter­ested in mature RDF/RSS feed client projects for GNU/Linux

should con­sider the other prod­ucts I’ve men­tioned above… pfft! This is great, for me.

If you’re run­ning Linux, BSD or Mac OS X, I’d rec­om­mend you check it out… there are peo­ple main­tain­ing pack­ages for Debian, RedHat/Fedora, SuSE, Gen­too, Slack­ware, FreeBSD and MacOS, links to which are avail­able on their Instal­la­tion page.

Tags: BSD, Fedora, FreeBSD, Gentoo, GNU/Linux, Java, Linux, Mac OS X, MacOS, Novell, online news feeds, operating system, Perl, RAM, RDF, Slackware, staple applications, SuSE, sydney