Ubuntu feisty fully patched, with LAMP intalled and running. P4 2.8, 1Gb ram.

Booting into Gnome from the login sfreen takes nearly 5 minutes, then loading apps takew ages. Thunderbird takes 4 minutesto lad, but once loaded operates at normal speed. Same with Firefox, xmms, the Gimp, Nautilus, Gnome terminal all takes ages to load then operate normally when loaded. Other apps, like Eterm or aterm, OpenOffice load and runb normally.

There is nothing in /var/log/syslog except a long running keymap problem with my wireless Microsoft keyboard. If I start an app from inside a console and redirect all output and errors to a file, nothing to show (firefox >err.log 2>&1).

All I can conclude is that some file or files specific to the Gnome desktop are corrupt. I have Xfce and KDE loaded, so if I log into one of them would it be safe to remove and re-install Gnome (gnome, gnome-common, gnome-desktop, gdm) ? Any ideas what the problem is or ways to identify it?

I took this to the Ubuntu forums, but no answers or suggestions at all.

Hi, I seam to have the exact same problem than you have (was about to post here) on Debian Lenny, with a Gnome 2.18 pulled out of Sid, so probably something relatively equivalent to your Ubuntu set up. And I already posted it in the Debian forums (no solution so far).

I also noticed that vim (not gvim) the terminal one also takes ages to load. I "benchmarked" gedit to load in exactly 1 min.

However, I recently noticed the extra time only happens when the laptop is not connected to the internet. When it is connected, things load at a very normal speed, when disconnected, starting an app:
- click
- "starting <app>" appears in the task bar
- disappears from the task bar
- 1 min
- the app shows up

Do we have the exact same problem? Could you try that?

Also in my case, the computer boots fast until gdm, gdm also loads fast, only after I log in do I have these slow downs.

For me, it occurs on a fresh install, in your case, did it happen only recently after you updated "something" and can you trace that "something"?

Before reinstalling the whole gnome thing, one should try removing the specific settings (or rather moving them to another name/place) and see if it helps to start "from sratch". I believe these config files, or at least most of them, reside in ~/.gnome and ~/.gnome2 so you could try logging into XFCE, KDE or just plain console and move those directories under a different name (for example ~/.gnome -> ~/.gnome_moved), then re-login to Gnome and see if that helped (if not, move them back to the original name).

If it depends on an internet connection, it sounds scary. Are you sure your loopback connections are fine?

I jumped in feet first and removed Gnome. I used aptitude remove gnome-common gnome-desktop-data rather than apt-get and then aptitude install gnome-desktop-environment, logged in and everything is back to normal.

I also solved my problem (without reinstalling) by adding my hostname to /etc/hosts like so

/etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost <MyHostname>