When you login to newt you may see some introductory messages printed on your terminal. These fall into two categories: messages from the msgs program, and messages from the notice program.
msgs is a standard Berkeley UNIX program that allows the system manager to place messages in an area that everyone can read. These messages are usually quite important, and will tell you about things like scheduled stoppages of newt, new software that has been added, which disks are being backed-up, and so on. If you don't read the messages, and then you ask the system manager a question that was answered by one of the messages, the result will be unpredictable and possibly dangerous.
The msgs messages are placed in /usr/msgs. To search the messages for a given topic, try
grep -i topic /usr/msgs/*
To get more information about how to use msgs type man msgs. If you see the following message when you login,
You have new msgs, use msgs to read them.
Then you should type msgs to read them.
notice is a program written by Michael Ashley to allow individual users to post announcements that appear when people login. The announcements appear as one-line messages, with the option for additional text being associated with the message. Notices have a number, and if the one-line message contains a plus sign (`+'), then you can obtain more information by typing notice number. Notices are posted to one of a number of different groups (e.g., astro, bio, theo), and you can choose which groups you subscribe too. For more information about notice type notice -h.