Huge Gnome startup delay

[Robbo]

On Sun, 2005-07-10 at 13:05 -0400, Jeff Peeler wrote:
> On Sun, 10 Jul 2005 14:28:21 +0100, Lee Braiden wrote:
> 
> > On Sunday 10 Jul 2005 13:50, Jeff Peeler wrote:
> >> I'm having about a 2 minute and 30 second startup delay every time gnome
> >> starts. Everything loads as expected until gnome-panel loads. It then
> >> just shows the two "bars" and then sits there and finally loads
> >> everything.>
> > Here's what I have tried so far:
> >>
> >> I tried a new .gnome2 directory with no success. I tried logging in with
> >> another user and the same delay occurs. I tried removing everything in
> >> the /tmp dir. I saw a Breezy post about this and thought it might be
> >> worth a shot. I tried deleting everything in the
> >> .gnome2/panel2.d/default/launchers directory. This fix actually worked
> >> temporarily and startup occurred a few times normally. Upon restart
> >> though the same delay returned.
> > 
> > You might try "ping localhost" in a console or terminal, just to make sure
> > localhost is defined correctly.  Also, try pinging the hostname of your
> > machine:
> > 
> >   ping `hostname`
> >   ping `hostname -f`
> 
> Both ping tests were successful.

Is your DNS address setup for your ISP's server?, if so what may be
happening depending how you connect to the internet is try to resolve
your `hostname` via these first and the delay is when it trys to connect
to the internet (or time's out because you manually connect).  Also if
you use a modem/router/another PC as your DNS server, this may be timing
out when trying to find your ISP's (or root) DNS servers.

The above may be the case if you have changed your host file to not
resolve your `hostname` to be the localhost address, or have changed the
order 

In /etc/hosts the default looks like for 127.0.0.1

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost `hostname`

change `hostname` to be your hostname of course!

and /etc/nsswitch.conf hosts line looks like..

hosts:          files dns


One way to test this is before logging into gnome, switch to a terminal
(Ctrl-Alt-F1) and try pinging your hostname, if it takes a while to
resolve then look at the above...