A news aggregator is software which collect news, weblog posts, and other information from the web so that they can be read in a single location for easy viewing. With the range of news sources available on the internet, news aggregators play an essential role in helping users to quickly locate breaking news.
For individuals that read lots of weblogs, a news aggregator makes keeping track of them effortless, and particularly useful if the weblogs are only updated occasionally.
Lettura is a cross-platform news reader that supports RSS and Atom feeds. This is free and open source software.
Installation
We evaluated Lettura using the ubiquitous Ubuntu 24.10 distro.
There’s a deb package available from the project’s GitHub repository, so installation should be plain sailing. That’s not the case unfortunately.
We downloaded the deb file and attempted to install it with dpkg, a tool which installs (and removes and manages) on Debian-based distros like Ubuntu.
$ sudo dpkg -i lettura_0.1.22_amd64.deb
libwebkit2gtk-4.0 is not present in Ubuntu 24.10’s standard repositories. We can install this library by first adding the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy main
Then enter the commands:
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev
$ sudo apt --fix-broken install
Starting Lettura from Activities in our GNOME desktop yields no output. In this situation, start a terminal and run the program from the command-line. We get the error:
lettura: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.1.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Ubuntu 24.10 doesn’t provide libssl@1.1. We hunted down the libssl package and installed it.
$ wget http://nz2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/o/openssl/libssl1.1_1.1.1f-1ubuntu2.24_amd64.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i libssl1.1_1.1.1f-1ubuntu2.24_amd64.deb
Now the software runs. A bit of a pig’s breakfast. With hindsight, we probably should have installed the AppImage (untested), or install the software using pnpm, a JavaScript package manager.
Besides Linux, the software runs under macOS and Windows.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation and Summary
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary