[Pan-users] Re: Installation sucessful, but no joy

[Duncan]

Tim Philp posted <address@hidden>, excerpted below,  on Sun,
13 Jun 2004 22:59:26 -0400:

> I installed PAN on my debian system and it connects properly to my news 
> server and brings down the list of headers. When I try to look at the 
> messages, I get nothing in the message window. Double clicking on the 
> name of the news group produces only the option to get the new messages, 
> but I never see any. Since there is no manual online, I don't know where 
> to turn.
> Help!

The guy that builds the debs generally hangs here and should be able to
help you with anything Debian specific.  Meanwhile, I run Mandrake (and am
working on Gentoo), not Debian, and haven't seen that sort of thing
reported b4, so can't help with specifics, but here's some general stuff
that might help..

First, how it /should/ work, so you know where you are.

When you first enter a new server, it should see no list of groups and
offer to d/l one.  Once that is done, it should populate the group pane
with the list of groups, from which you can click on a group, entering it.
It would appear you got that far.

What PAN does when you enter a group depends on what preferences are set
for.  I long since forgot what the defaults are, since one of the first
things I do with a new app is check settings and customize them if the
defaults don't fit my style, but take a look at the "Automatic  Downloads"
section on the "Behavior" tab.  If it's set to do so, it'll d/l new
overviews (aka headers, altho that's technically incorrect, since an
overview is only a subset of post headers), populating the overview (aka
header) pane.  I have mine to only d/l new overviews when I initiate the
action.

Once the header pane is populated, clicking on a new header will normally
cause the message to be displayed in the body pane.  Under certain
circumstances, PAN may think the message is a middle part of a multi-part,
and won't display it.  You can get around this by using the "Read" command
(right click on the overview).

It's a bit unclear from your message, since you said nothing appears in
the "message window", which I'd take to be the body pane, but which could
also be taken to mean the "message list", aka overview, aka header, pane,
whether you can't get overviews, or if once those are gotten, you can't
retrieve the body.  Please clarify in any followup.

Second, some troubleshooting tips.

Down in the bottom right corner (right end of status bar), there should be
an icon which when clicked brings up the status log.  This icon changes
when there's an error.  Anyway, take a look there and see if there are any
errors logged that might help diagnose and fix the problem.  (The same log
can be reached from the tools menu.)

One can start PAN from a terminal window, as well.  PAN, as many apps,
will output certain errors to stderr, normally closed so invisible with
graphic apps, but if you start it from a terminal window, it will output
them there, as well, or you can use standard redirection to output to a
file, instead.  Note of course that some complaints on stderr might not be
fatal or the cause of whatever is failing in your case.

Finally, PAN has quite a list of helpful debug modes, which will output
more debug info for that particular functionality to stderr.  As is
common, use the --help command line parameter to get a list of these. 
There might be one that will provide additional info on whatever is
happening in your case.

Hope that helps! =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin