[Pan-users] Re: Install of Pan on Windows

[Duncan]

Kevin Gottsman posted <address@hidden>,
excerpted below,  on Thu, 13 Jan 2005 22:53:24 -0600:

> I had to reload Windows XP on my work laptop and lost my previous Pan
> install. The previous install of 0.14.2 worked great. I am trying to
> install it again and having issues. I installed Charles's binary of Pan
> (0.14.2). GTK from the Pan site (2.2.4.1) was installed. I also have GTK
> 2.4.13a from Gaim installed.
> 
> The problem is that I have no text at all. On launching Pan, there is
> usually a standard message in the message pane. With my install, its
> empty. Same with all the menus, I can activate the menus and see various
> icons on the menus but no text.
> 
> I posted a screen shot at: 
> 
> http://www.gottsman.com/pan_windows.jpg

Wow!  That's an eerie screen-shot!  The lack of text reminds me of the
stories and photos I've seen of Chernobyl (I think it was, the city
around it, not the nuclear plant itself, someone else closer to it might
correct my details) after the disaster and evacuation. Hi-rise buildings,
dolls, bicycles, due to the hurriedness of the evacuation, much left as if
people were just going about their business and then disappeared.  It's
weird seeing all those icons and an in general functional application, but
without any text whatsoever!

I've left MS OSs like  a defector leaves his old nation and life, saying
good-bye (bad-bye?), adopting a new one in a new place, the "land of the
free", never to return until or unless the dictatorial regime changes
(MS goes FREE source), altho not likely even then, as I've already built
a new life, so I'm not going to be of much specific help there. 

However, on a hunch, I'll say that looks like it could be something to do
with the i18n/l10n. (Internationalisation is i followed by 18 letters n,
similarly localization is l10n, rather common abbreviations in the
globalized multi-language open source world at a least.)  I'm not that
familiar with the internals of GTK+, but from a bit of experience manually
fetching, compiling, and installing GTK+2 when it first came out, before
my distribution had available for packaged install, IIRC it's the pango
portion (1 of 3 interrelated components) of GTK+ that deals with that.

If that hunch is correct, then fixing the problem /may/ be as simple as
correctly configuring your GTK+ language preferences, expressed on Linux
as $LANG and similar environmental variables.

Or.. it could be that GTK+ is installed but that the pango component
cannot be found for some reason.

Just shots in the dark, really.  They may or may not be of help in at
least pointing you in the right direction.  Hope you get it working, in
any case.  BTW, if you ever decide to defect, you'll have friends over
here willing to help as best we can, having made the journey ourselves,
sometime before.

-- 
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