Configuring Netscape Communicator

Communicator is a program that has built in all the components necessary to take advantage of all the services available on the Web: http, ftp, gopher, and telnet. It can also send and receive e-mail, read news groups, write HTML pages, browse File Systems, etc.

In this chapter we will cover Netscape Configuration, like a User guide and explain how to browse the Web, receive e-mails, read news groups and other similar operations in depth.
 
 

Browsing the Internet

The World Wide Web has the ability to assign "links" to images and words, which lead you to files on the Internet or on your local disk. Its great success has made it necessary to develop new daemons on Linux and other operating systems.
 

The http protocol

The daemon which provides the http (HyperText Transport Procol) service is httpd. One of the most famous http server daemons is Apache, which is included in Red Hat Linux.

Communicator takes complete advantage of this protocol by sending requests to the remote httpd server and loading remote images and words which make up an HTML page. Today, Communicator is the best "browser" available on Linux and on all operating systems.

This is a screen that shows us how Communicator loads the main page of the site "http://www.futuretg.com", with its links and images.
 
 

Communicator offers various operations. The most frequent are:

• Bookmarking a remote page in a "Bookmarks list": 
• Offering the the option to not load images. This lets you save time on a slow access PC.
• Reloading the current page, with the "Reload" button.
• Seeing how the remote page was written with "View" -> "Page Source".
• Printing the current page.
• Going back to the previous page, with the "Back" button.
• Going back to a local or remote visited page, with the command: "Communicator" -> "History", as we show in the figure.

With the Communicator is possible to browse also local File System by just writing the word: "file:" or the local directory, because Communicator accepts and automatically processes the local request, adding the word "file:" before the directory name.

The ftp protocol

If the site is a remote FTP server, we have to complete the remote address, as for example:
 
 

In the download phase, the icon for download is as follows: 

Some years ago, when the Web was not so popular, people used the gopher service on character based terminals to "search" for information in remote directories. Communicator also offers this capability.

telnet sessions from Netscape

Communicator lets you open remote telnet sessions. Its simply launchs

This is a typical Communicator "telnet" session:

All the http, telnet, ftp, gopher, and file functions can be used on local or remote HTML pages. In our course, we include a list of "telnet" sessions by which it is possible to search books in many libraries all over the world. (Consult the page telnet.html).

Other Netscape Communicator functions are e-mail management and news group reading.