Re: [Pan-users] How best to get PAN running on anything I own - I'm at a dead end

[Duncan]

Alan Taylor posted on Thu, 22 Jan 2015 22:11:24 -0400 as excerpted:

> @Max S.  I have Pan 0.140 running no trouble on windows 8.1 64 bit with
> 3G of ram.  When I run the "about" part of "help" it says: Chocolate
> Salty Balls (Unknown; i686-pc-mingw32).  (I had 4G ram but one stick
> went bad. That worked fine too.)
> 
> Before I installed Win 8.1 64 I had Win 8.1 32 bit (2G ram) and Pan ran
> fine then.  I don't know for sure what version Pan was but I expect it
> was the 32-bit version of Pan 0.140.  So don't give up.  Now why you're
> having trouble I don't know.  What are the symptoms?
> 
> On 22 January 2015 at 18:27, Max S.
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>> Hi - I had enjoyed PAN for years until my Windows XP system (on a
>> dual-boot Mac) died. I have since bought a Win-dedicated machine with
>> 8.1,
>> and had no luck in getting the Windows port of PAN to run on Win 8.1.
>>
>> My Macs are fairly old, by computer hardware standards. One runs OS
>> 10.10.1, the other 10.6.8.  From what I glean on the web, getting
>> Ubuntu to run on my “11,1” 10.10.1 Mac in a dual boot doesn’t like like
>> a very good thing at all.

Several points...

1) First, a netiquette reminder to all.

What you do in private mail is up to you, but please observe standard 
netiquette at least on the pan list.  As we're all pan users I guess we 
all know what pan strongly encourages and I suppose you at least don't 
object /too/ strongly or you'd be using some other news client.  So (a) 
plain text only, no HTML please, and (b) top quote, bottom reply in 
context, it makes things SO much easier to keep in context in further 
followups.

It's worth noting that a number of regulars read/reply to the list 
actually using pan (via gmane.org's list2news service), so I guess you 
can imagine what your HTML gobbledegook looked like. And of course trying 
to make sense of a bunch of top/bottom posts doesn't work well either.
=:^(

That's actually why I replied here instead of to Ben.  I decided it 
wasn't worth the effort to sort out the double-top posting and get proper 
context to reply to, so I replied where it was only a single layer deep, 
instead.

Thanks. =:^)

2) As others have stated, pan should work fine on MS windows.  I've been 
off of proprietary servantware (see the sig) for over a decade now so 
don't work with it there myself, but others do.

3) What pan-windows versions are you (both those in-thread with it 
working, and the OP, trying to get it working) using?  Where did you 
download them, or did you build them yourself from sources, or...?  And 
what's the git tag and build date?  Also, dependency libraries such as gtk 
installed, or is the build a static-build, including them?

Version 0.140 is actually unreleased, so that signifies the git version 
from after 0.139's release.  The folks doing the pan-windows builds 
periodically do a new build generally based off current git, so the git 
commit number and build date matters.

Additionally, the folks doing the pan-windows build I believe generally 
static-link the various libraries pan depends on, or if they don't, you 
need appropriate versions of those installed where pan can load them as 
well.  Often it's library issues, not pan code itself, that is breaking, 
and comparing notes on which builds work and what other libraries may 
need installed to get it working seems to be quite useful, at least to me 
watching the pan-windows folks struggle.

And FWIW, there are at least two people doing pan-windows builds.  
Sometimes people post that the one works for them but the other doesn't.  
So...

But generally, people seem to get a working pan on MS if they are 
suitably determined.

4) Pan-OSX seems to be, from my observations, a bit more hit and miss.  
Or at least, there's less folks on the same OSX version and using the 
same port, so there's less support and everyone on OSX more or less has 
to figure out what works for themselves.

But it is known to be workable and working for some.

5) Having at least run on MS windows, even if it was a decade and a half 
ago now, but having never run on Apple anything, I know even less about 
Apple products than MS, and haven't a clue just how old those Mac numbers 
are.  Is it since since OSX went x86?  What sort of memory do they have 
and what's the CPU?

If they're x86, then there's definitely a number of Linux distros that 
will run on the hardware, as that wasn't all that long ago.  The speed of 
the CPU and amount of memory will determine what's likely to work best, 
but there are *DEFINITELY* slim distros and desktops that should still 
work very well on it, even if it's old sub-GHz and sub-GiB memory.

If it's old enough that it's PPC, then there's still some Linux distros 
that will run on it, but your choices are more limited, and I've very 
little knowledge on how well they run or what sort of issues you can 
expect, so I won't be of much help in the recommendation department.  But 
it's certainly possible, and I know for sure that at least gentoo, my 
distro of choice, still does ppc.  But of course gentoo is a from-sources 
distro, and on older hardware, you're going to need some patience to 
build it.  OTOH, it's likely to run somewhat faster when it's built and 
running, because on gentoo you only build in what you want/need, so the 
binaries tend to be slimmer and less bloated, requiring less memory and 
running a bit faster than they'd run with pretty much everything builtin, 
which is what most binary distros tend to do.

Of course living in the (virtual) land of freedomware myself, I'd love it 
if you decided to go Linux at least multi-boot, but it remains your 
hardware and thus your choice to make.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman