using the captioned new inetutils-inetd version does not allow me to access news groups: slrn complains it cannot connect to localhost and AAMOF I can see that port no. 119/tcp in not brought up. Version 2:1.5.dfsg.1-9 runs smoothly.
Can you please try compiling inetutils from source code, and see if that works? You can find the latest version at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/inetutils/
