FAQ Revised: Sat Jun 17 11:33:38 2000
Pan is a powerful, friendly Usenet newsreader that is very good for reading news and downloading binary messages. A more complete list of Pan's features can be found on the feature page.
Mail it to the Pan Users mailing list, where other users can discuss your request. Most of our best feature requests come from here.
Bug reports can also be sent to the mailing list, but if you're including large attachments of extra information, you should probably mail it directly to pan@superpimp.org instead. Please take a moment to read our bug report page before submitting a bug report.
The Pan Users mailing list is archived at http://www.egroups.com/group/pan-users/.
No. It's just a joke.
It's hard to beat Helix's desktop installer for installing your pick of gnome libraries (such as Pan's prerequisites: gtk+ and gnome-libs) and the latest stable version of Pan.
The latest beta and stable versions of Pan are always available from our download page in RPM, tarball, and deb format as well.
If you're just looking to upgrade a single library that Pan needs, like gtk+, rpmfind is also a good choice.
They are all ways of packaging Pan. RPM files are used by Red Hat, Mandrake, and most other versions of Linux. Deb files are used by the Debian project. Tarballs are like zip files of the Pan source code.
More information on using RPMs can be found at Red Hat's man page. More information on using debs can be found at Debian's User Tutorial.
Some users have complained that they can't install new RPMs of gnome-libs because gnomee-libs depends gnome-libs-devel and vice versa. The solution to this is to install both at the same time: ``rpm -Uvh gnome-libs-X.rpm gnome-libs-devel-X.rpm'' (all on one line). This works for any set of matched rpms (such as gtk and gtk-devel).
This is probably because the database files have changed between versions of Pan. (They often do, unfortunately. As we get closer to a stable 1.0 release, we'll freeze the format.) The easiest way to solve this problem is to remove including in the `.pan' directory in your home directory: ``rm -rf ~/.pan''.
First, see the previous installation FAQ entries to decide whether or not you really want to build Pan from the source code. CVS is usually used by bleeding-edge users, developers, and translators.
Various libraries that Pan uses -- like gettext, glib, gtk+ -- come with utilities for `configure' scripts (such as Pan's) to use. Usually these are kept in /usr/share/aclocal or /usr/local/share/aclocal. For whatever reason, some platforms don't have these files, or have them in the wrong directories. For AM_PATH_GLIB or AM_PATH_GTK, you'll want glib.m4 and gtk.m4, which can be found in the gtk/glib tarballs at www.gtk.org. You may also need to install gettext and its gettext.m4 file.
The text entry field on the group toolbar lets you do pattern-matching on groups. Just type in a substring (ex: "comp.lang.*") and hit return.
Pan uses the Gnome mime settings for this information. If you've got gnome installed, you can do this by selecting `Document Handlers->Default Editor->mime types' from the gnome control center application (gnomecc). Otherwise, you can create/edit the file $HOME/.gnome/mime-info/user.keys like this.
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.
Pan keeps its server, group, and article information in the `.pan' directory in your home directory. These files are BerkeleyDB database files. Other configuration settings are kept in the gnome-config setup, which is typically in `.gnome/Pan' in your home directory.
If you've got DSL, a cable modem, or some other fast connection, you may want to increase the number of simultaneous connections you can make to your news servers. This can be done in the Preference dialog's NNTP settings, which lets you set the maximum total and per-server conncetions Pan will make.
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. |
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.
If you've just upgraded, refer to the installation section of the FAQ. Otherwise, it's likely that a database file has gotten corrupted. If you start Pan from the command line, It will usually print out a ``Pan might crash now'' message before this happens. If this is the case, you may be able to delete the database file referred to by this message. If this doesn't solve the problem, please let us know.
Pan 0.9.0, which is under development now, should have fewer database corruption problems.
In the grouplist you need to double-click, rather than single-click, on the group which you're insterested in.
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.
Pan is distributed under the GNU Public License (GPL), which is described in detail at GNU's description of licenses page and the GPL itself.
Pan has been tested to run on Linux and Solaris is known to work on FreeBSD. If you have had success getting Pan running on any other platforms tell us about it.
Yes. Pan is written to be used with Gnome.
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.
No. Pan is intended for platforms that have Gnome libraries installed. There are many good newsreaders available for Windows, notably Xnews and Agent.
Most likely. Gnome is a good application platform and is free to everyone, so we feel it would be a waste of time to port it. If you'd like to rewrite the Gnome parts of Pan, though, feel free to mail us your patch.
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'
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. tovj@superpimp.org is the Pan translation point-of-contact.