Pan newsreader closes immediately on launch

Suddenly, I can't get into Pan. As soon as I launch it, whether from the desktop shortcut or from the applications menu, it comes up for a fraction of a second and then disappears again.
I'm using Ubuntu 8.10 and I'm a recent newuser of Linux so I don't know how to fiddle with the system. I uninstalled Pan and installed it again but it made no difference.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

try launching pan from the command line. that way when it crashes you should see the error message that's at fault in the terminal window.

Nick

 

Thanks for answering. Yes, I tried that but didn't understand the answer. I did try posting it somewhere to see if anyone understood it but got no reply. However - the problem no longer applies. I installed Jaunty 9.04 UNR on my AAO and, though most of the other problems I had are now solved, I can't get Pan past the 'download newsgroups' part. It just keeps sitting there, hour after hour, clocking up hundreds of thousands of newsgroups (according to Pan) but without ever finishing the task.