I have Debian Woody r2 installed on my laptop. I configured the network (I am on a LAN, so I connect to the net using the eth0) via the Debian installer. Now when the net is alright, it is fine. But when I stop the network (or when the net is down, due to other reasons), the bootup slows down greatly and more importantly, the x-terms (and gnome terminal emulators) take a long time to show up after they are instantiated. But no other problems occur and once instantiated, the x-term responses are fine. I do not have netenv installed. Is this a problem? If not, what else could be the causes of this strange thing.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Maidros

I have seen the same thing recently while installing an ADSL internet server. It appears that the system is trying to establish a connection and will repeat repetively until ( I assume) some time-out kicks in. I verfied this by editing the /etc/network/interfaces. If you know you are not going to be using networking then edit the interfaces before the next reboot or do /etc/init.d/networking stop.

Thanks for the help. Is there any way to tamper with the number of attempts or the timing?
Regards,
Maidros

Sorry no I don't know the internals well enough. You have a couple of options. If you use grub then you could boot into recovery mode, switch off networking and then tell it to continue in normal mode. The other alternative is basically the same thing but configure boot to go to maintenance (i.e. single user shell) in the first instance.

Thanks for the info.
Regards,
Maidros