Re: [Pan-users] Re: Lost my configuration?

[Ron Blizzard]

On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 3:30 PM, Duncan <address@hidden> wrote:
> Ron Blizzard posted on Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:49:24 -0600 as excerpted:
>
>> I don't know what I've done, but last night I ran Pan and was greeted
>> with a "Welcome to Pan" dialogue -- and "first you need to set up a
>> server." Brand new, like I've never used Pan. But I've been using Pan on
>> this VectorLinux machine for over two months and would just as soon not
>> rebuild my killfiles, etc. (Not that it would be that big of a deal, I
>> only use two newsgroups.) But I still want to know what happened, if
>> possible.
>>
>> In my home directory I've still got the ".pan" directory and, as far as
>> I can tell, all the information is still there. How do I get Pan to
>> "see" my user information? And what do I do to get it *not* to see this
>> information?
>>
>> Thanks for any pointers.
>
> What version of pan, and is this a machine that you've been using for
> awhile, or a home dir that you copied from your old machine?

Actually, I *did* have the .pan2 directory and not the .pan directory.
I thought it was a backup and that I had somehow lost the .pan
directory -- so I renamed it ".pan". I noticed though, that Pan
rebuilt .pan2 when I ran it, so I was beginning to figure out that I
was clueless.

And sorry about the lack of information.

I'm using VectorLinux 6.0 deluxe (based on Slackware), which uses the
2.6.27.12 kernel. Pan version is 0.133.  I think I formatted my drive
with ext3. (I'll have to see how I can find out for sure -- don't
currently know the command.)

> I ask because pan hasn't used the .pan dir by default for quite some time,
> since the old and officially unsupported for years C based 0.14.x series.
> Newer pan (from the C++ 0.90 rewrite, which is like, half a decade old
> now, so it's not /that/ new), uses the ~/.pan2 dir by default, altho (with
> 0.90+) you can set an export the PAN_HOME environmental variable to point
> to your location of choice, starting pan with that in the environment, if
> you want to override the default.
>
> So assuming you aren't exporting PAN_HOME to change it (and assuming your
> distribution doesn't change it via distribution patch), you're either
> using a very very old pan, or that .pan dir is cruft left around from when
> you were, and you really did lose the .pan2 dir.

Sorry for the confusion. I think my CentOS machine still used the
older version of Pan so I assumed ".pan" would be the default.

> If you lost the .pan2 directory, it's likely due to some filesystem or
> hardware error.  You didn't mention what filesystem you use either, or the
> kernel version or anything... but if you do an fsck, you might have the
> missing dir show up in lost&found, at the root of whatever partition your
> home dir is on, possibly with a different name if the name was lost in the
> corruption as well.

But the directory is *not* missing. I just misnamed it before when I
assumed .pan2 was the backup directory. It's now back to to .pan2 and
my groups, killfiles, cache and everything are all still there. The
directory is just not "connected" to Pan somehow.

> If you're really using an old enough pan that the .pan dir is valid...
> well, I did keep an old pan version around for answering questions on it
> for years, but decided to clean it up, a couple months ago or so.  I think
> I was one of the last regulars here with it still installed, so I doubt
> you'll have much luck with specifics.  While there were similarities in
> file format, they're not generally compatible, thus the use of different
> data directories.  But certainly I and I expect others will certainly help
> when we can.

You really helpful with the problems I was having on an old version of
Pan when using CentOS as my main Desktop computer. But this is a new
version, even though I inadvertently misled you.

> Perhaps it's time you upgraded to something semi-modern, like pan-0.133
> (itself over a year old), or even pull from the git sources either at
> gnome, or better yet, khaley's repository, and compile from them.

I just need to know how to get Pan and the .pan2 directory back
together. They seem to have had a falling out. Is there a particular
configuration file that I should be looking at?

Thanks. I'm sorry for the confusion in my first post.

-- 
RonB -- Using VectorLinux Deluxe 6.0