Re: Re: [Pan-users] Re: Breakthrough using 'new Pan' on 'Mandriva Free 2007'

[Kelly Martin]

On 11/29/06, Maurice Batey <address@hidden> wrote:
>   Well, although that might well do the trick, it's far too convoluted for me,
> and anyway I don't have the incentive to make life more difficult when I can
> rely on good old 'old' Pan!

Personally, I use the old 0.14.2-stable branch of Pan (circa 2003) as
well. It has more features than the current beta releases, and fewer
bugs. While it's disappointing to use a three year old version, I just
want to download binaries. Pan betas don't seem to care much about
binaries and have some bugs that are really annoying. I've posted
about them several times here but they have never been addressed, so I
give up and won't mention them again. Pan 0.14.2 works good enough, in
a retro kind of way.

There are much better options for downloading Usenet binaries on other
platforms - on Windows, the Newsbin Pro ($ shareware) application is
pretty much the ultimate as a binary grabber. I bought it years ago
and it's still under active development. Problem is, Mac and Linux
users must run it inside a virtual machine with Windows. There is
nothing the caliber of Newsbin Pro on Linux/Unix yet, unfortunately.
And I prefer using a Mac or Linux & BSD.

On OS X, Pan 0.14.2 runs fine inside the X11/GTK2 environment but
still has that quirky linux interface. Maybe one day I'll take the
0.14.2 source and work on a Mac-like Aqua interface to pan, to greatly
simplify its use. Until then, the only options are to run Newsbin Pro
inside a VM, or use the old version of Pan circa 2003 [sigh].