FAQ Revised: Tue Feb 22 10:16:30 2000

Table of Contents

1. General
2. Troubleshooting
3. Tips
4. Platforms
5. Languages

1. General

1.1. What is Pan?

Pan is a powerful, friendly Usenet client that is very good for newsreading and for retreiving binary messages. For more information about Pan's features, see Pan's feature page

1.2. I have a bug report or feature request. Who should I tell?

You can contact the Pan developers through direct e-mail, on IRC, or on the Pan mailing list. The Pan contact page lists these addresses. If you're reporting a bug, please check the known bugs page and see if we have already fixed your bug. If we don't know about it, you should report it as described on our report-a-bug page.

1.3. Can I use parts of Pan's source code in my free software project?

Pan is distributed under the GNU Public License (GPL), so you are welcome and encouraged to do this so long as your software project has a GPL-compatible license. See GNU's description of licenses page and the GPL itself for more information.

2. Troubleshooting

2.1. I selected some files and then did a "decode message", where are the files?

They should be in ~/.pan/download. You can change the directory that decoded files are saved to by going to the Settings menu then Preferences, then to the 'Dirs' tab.

2.2. I am running an 800x600 desktop but pan will not allow a horizontal resize to make it all fit on one screen.

Usually the cause of this is that the two toolbars (group, article) are stacked side-by-side instead of one on top of the other. Try dragging the article toolbar underneath the group toolbar. After you've done this once, Pan will remember your settings.

As of Pan 0.7.5, vertical stacking is the default for new users.

2.3. I'm getting a lot of socket errors. What can I do?

This question gets asked most by people downloading multiple binaries at a time and exceed their bandwidth or news server limitations. If you have your maximum number of connections set high and are getting socket errors, try lowering the maximum number to go easier on the network.

2.4. I just upgraded Pan and got a "Can't open database" error.

The error message you're referring to -- Can't open database ``filename'' -- is typically caused by upgrading to a new version of Pan and linking against a different version of libdb than you had used before. It seems that the RPM and tarball builds will often find and link against differing versions of libdb. So possible solutions are:

  1. If you installed with an RPM last time, use an RPM again. If you installed with a tarball last time, use a tarball again.
  2. Edit your Makefile to link against the version of libdb that you were using before.
  3. Delete the offending .db file and let Pan rebuild it. This is probably the easiest solution.

We're trying to find a better answer to this. If you're an RPM guru and know the answer to this, please drop us a line.

3. Tips

3.1. I've got a fast net connection. Can I do two things at once, like getting group headers from two groups, or downloading two binaries?

From the edit menu, open the Preferences dialog. There you can edit your NNTP Server's settings, and one of these is the maximum number of connections. You can have up to 4 connections at a time.

3.2. Is there a quick way to find the group I'm looking for?

Yes. The text entry field on the group toolbar lets you do pattern-matching on groups. Just type in a substring (ex: "comp.lang.py") and hit return.

3.3. I use my mouse as little as possible. Are there any keyboard bindings in Pan?

Though they're not finished, there should be enough to let you navigate through Pan:

UP and DOWN navigate the article or group lists
ENTER perform the "open" operation on the current selection and flip pages (i.e. in the group list, press enter while highlighting a group and it opens the group and puts you in the article list).
Q flip back out of your current page to the previous (i.e. from the article list to the group list).
+ or - expand or contract the threads in the article list.


3.4. I'd like to change the keybindings. Can I?

Yes. Move your mouse over to the shift+ctrl+n menu button (or whatever menu button you're interested in) and press the keybinding that you want to change this menu option to. The menu will automatically update itself. I'd like to take credit for this, but it's a Gtk+ feature.

4. Platforms

4.1. Does Pan run on my Operating System?

Pan has been tested to run on Linux and is known to work on Solaris and FreeBSD. If you have had success getting Pan running on any other platforms tell us about it.

4.2. Does Pan run on GNOME?

Yes. Pan is written to be used with GNOME.

4.3. Does Pan run on KDE?

Yes. Pan works nicely on KDE and other non-GNOME desktop environments. Some GNOME libraries must be installed, but GNOME itself need not be running in order to use Pan. (One of the Pan developers uses GNOME half the time and KDE the other half!) See the requirements page for more details.

4.4. Does Pan run on Windows?

No. We are targeting platforms with GNOME libraries installed. There are many good newsreaders available for Windows, notably Xnews and Agent.

4.5. Is there a version of Pan that doesn't require GNOME?

No. Gnome gives Pan the preferences dialog, the font/color picker, the popup dialogs, the menus/toolbars, the user configuration file parsing, and the icon loading routines. If you'd like to rewrite these in straight Gtk+, feel free.

The developers of Pan support GPL software and GNOME, and most Linux distributions preload GNOME already. We have no plans to remove the GNOME requirements from Pan.

5. Languages

5.1. How do I run Pan in one of its translated foreign languages?

After running 'make install' or installing a pre-compiled package, set the 'LANG' environment variable to your two letter language code (e.g. 'ko' for Korean), and start pan.

To set environment variables in Bash, try the command line 'LANG=ko; export LANG'

5.2. I'm bilingual. How can I help with translating?

Thanks for thinking about helping. Open Source thrives on donation and volunteerism. Begin by going to the 'po' dir from the decompressed source code package. Then copy the 'pan.pot' file over to a file named (two-letter country code).po. For example, To translate to Spanish, copy pan.pot to 'es.po'. Then, open up the .po in a text editor, fill out the header with your information, and then fill out the body with the translated text. e-mail us the .po file you made and you'll have your name announced in the next release version of Pan.