[Pan-users] Re: Pan v0.14.2.91 crashing X hard (black screen)/messing up NVIDIA card badly...

[Duncan]

Phillip Pi <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sat, 26 Aug
2006 02:02:10 -0700:

> In alt.binaries.ipod.videos.movies newsgroup on news.giganews.com server,
> it appears that specific threads or something is hard crashing my X server
> with a black screen and locked video card in KDE v3.5 (Gnome didn't crash,
> but showed corrupted texts) with Pan v0.14.2.9 in this specific binary
> newsgroup.

I'm going to be subscribing to newshosting this weekend (waiting to see if
someone wants to sponsor me and get the kickback ATM, anybody here?  I may
have subscribed time you reply, but worth a shot) and may be able to try
it.  Any idea the relative date range causing the issue?

> You can read the details at
> http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=975183 ...
> 
> Has anyone seen or have this problem? I am not planning to upgrade to the
> newer Pan version since it doesn't have all the features I use in the
> older one.

That's the first time I've seen anything similar reported in the pan
groups/lists.

It's up to you whether you upgrade or not, of course, but you
realize the old code is now dead and not likely to be updated or bug-fixed
any further, right?  As such, while confirming the bug as a pan bug or
tracing it to something else (maybe NVidia since you appear to be
running their closed drivers and it certainly affects video) might be
worthwhile, spending too much time tracing bugs in the old code simply
won't be.

FWIW, I was previously suggesting folks stick with old-pan for text or if
they didn't need any of the new features.  With the last couple betas,
0.108 and 0.109, however, that's changed.  The new version has all my most
used features for text anyway, and is enough better for binaries I'm
getting back into them (thus the newshosting thing I mentioned above).

For categorizing, I'm using the $PAN_HOME environmental variable, with a
script setting it to one dir for my text groups, a second for binaries,
and a third for my test config (which allows me separate settings
appropriate to each, but also using symlinks, to use the same file where
appropriate, as with the accels.txt file).  That keeps displayed
subscribed groups to a manageable level, one of the big requests.  The
only other other one I still miss is the ability to actually kill (as in
delete) kill-scored posts, and mark-as-read low/negative scored posts (so
they'd be hidden by default, something I did in old-pan using rules.

That said, as I said, it's up to you when to upgrade and I definitely
understand not wanting to do so until new-pan is out of beta and into
stable, anyway, which it isn't yet.  Thus, at least trying to work thru
any issues in old-pan continues to be worthwhile.  I'll see if anything
strange comes up when I visit the group after subscribing to newshosting
(Cox's servers are crap ATM and have been most of the time for months, for
binaries of any size, tho std jpeg size bins seem to be semi-decent.)

-- 
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