Getting Started

This section provides information on how to start Pan, and describes the Pan user interface.

To Start Pan

How to start Pan depends on your desktop environment.

The GNOME Desktop Environment

Press the Super key to enter the Activities Overview, type pan, and then press Enter.

Command line

To start Pan from a command line, type the following command, then press Enter:

pan

When You Start Pan

When you start Pan, the following window is displayed:

Pan Main Window

This is the Pan main window

The main Pan window contains the following elements:

Menubar

The menubar contains all the commands that you need to run Pan.

Toolbar

The toolbar contains a subset of the commands that you can access from the menubar. It also contains two textboxes that allow you to limit the number of groups and/or the number of articles displayed.

Group Pane

The Group Pane displays a list of all the newsgroups available on the server. This list is split into two groups: Subscribed Groups are a user-selected list of favorite groups, Other Groups are the rest of the available groups from the server.

Header Pane

The Header Pane displays a list of all the individual article headers available in the selected group. The Header Pane is highly customizable via sorting, threading and scoring.

Body Pane

The Body Pane displays the text of the selected article header.

Status Bar

The Status Bar displays information about current Pan activity:

  • Current number of connections to the server

  • Number of uncompleted tasks in the Task Manager

  • Completed percentage of current tasks

  • Error status of the event log

When you right-click in the Pan window, the application displays a popup menu. The popup menu contains the most common commands for whichever pane you clicked.

Like other applications, actions in Pan can be performed in several ways: with the menu, with the toolbar or with shortcut keys. The shortcut key for most menu items is shown in the menu itself, following the menu command.