[Pan-users] Re: Follow question

[Duncan]

Doug Saylor posted on Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:03:17 -0500 as excerpted:

> Thanks again for everyone's help. Question: why didn't un-installing Pan
> then re-installing solve my problem? Thanks.

IIRC (after checking your OP), you're new to Linux from Windows, correct?

Linux works a bit differently than MS Windows in this regard.  Linux 
separates user data and general system configuration and applications 
much more effectively than MS does (or used to, anyway, I've not used MS 
since 9x).  The idea is that one should not affect the other, both 
because Linux, as with all *ix, was designed from the beginning as a 
multi-user system, with each user having their own separate settings, and 
so that each individual user and the system in general can be managed 
separately.

So when you uninstalled pan, you uninstalled the executable and other 
system data related to pan, but it didn't touch your user data, including 
your pan user data.  Since that's where the problem was, uninstalling and 
reinstalling pan did nothing to solve it.

Keep in mind that Linux (and Unix-like systems in general) are inherently 
multi-user.  As such, one effective troubleshooting method to see if it's 
your user config or a system setting at fault, is to create a new user, 
with default settings, login as that user, and see if it works then.  If 
it does, the problem is in your user config and must be fixed in the user 
config.  If it doesn't, the problem is system-wide and must be fixed 
system-wide.  When you are done testing, don't forget to delete the 
testing user config (/home/user directory), so the next time you test 
something, it's again starting from a clean config.  Otherwise, you're 
not testing with a clean user config and you might see problems with the 
old user config even if it's just a test user.

-- 
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