boy, what a fun time i've had in the past week trying to get a mythbox up. after 4 or 5 mandrake installs, a redhat install and a gentoo install i think i've finally gotten a good grasp on linux, at least the installation of it =). anyways...

my latest mandrake install went smooth, just put KDE in, installed the rest of what i needed through urpmi and thac's rpms. things were going realitively smoothly (had some network issues which i'm still trying to work out, but external to the mythbox), and i'm very close to a functional box. last night i got the soundblaster pci128 working, although there's alot of noise in its quiet signal. the tv out is even up from boot, so i can still mess with the bios with no monitor. very nice...

now all of the sudden, when i go to boot up the machine this morning, i'm getting _very_ slow bootup and performance. boot-up goes smooth until it gets to 'syslog' which hangs for 10-20 seconds before moving on. then it hangs at the logon prompt (text even though the inittab is set to 5) for another 10-20 seconds (i can actually log on and give a few commands before i'm whisked away to KDE). then KDE boots (by itself, level 5 boot) and it hangs for 10-20 seconds at the world icon and again at the monitor icon. after the boot screen goes away it's another 5-10 seconds before the icons pop and another 5-10 before the taskbar pops. now that i'm in (the mouse has worked normally this whole time) when i try to start anything up (terminal window or MCC usually) there's a 20+ second pause until the window pops up, then another 10-20 tyring to start up 'mythbackend &' and another 10-20 trying to start 'mythfrontend &', etc., etc.

as you can tell, this is all very annoying. there doesn't seem to be any disk access or any activity at all while these pauses are going on. it's just sitting there, seemingly thinking about whether it wants to perform the requested action or not. just yesterday it was all very smooth and, although a celeron 500 is not lighting fast, it was much more responsive. obviously something is stuck, not functioning properly.

i read about this in one or two threads, but there was no solution offered. any ideas? thanks.

mandrake 9.1
celeron 500
384 megs memory
12 gig system drive
120 gig storeage drive
dvd-rom
8139 nic
nvidia mx440
pvr-250

Did you check the pagefile?

i'm a linux newbie, so let me try to interpolate:

do you mean check the swap partition for consitancy? like a linux equivelent (isn't my spelling awful? public school) of checkdisk? how would i do that?

there doesn't seem to be any disk access at all duing these pauses, nothing at all happens beyond the spinning hourglass pointer (at least when KDE is up, nothing at all otherwise).

btw, everything seems to run smoothly after it's up and going, it's just starting up that it pauses. i do have some stuttering issues in mythtv, but my guess is the more the slow processor than these other issues.

This sounds alot like my first expierience with Mandrake. I found that after checking the /etc/hosts file it had no entry for my boxes name(?) and it's ip, so I'd reccomend adding that in(as root):

"boxname" localhost

It's been a long long time since I've dealt with my hosts file, so if anybody can expand on the syntax that would be great.

Althor880

i think i've discovered the problem source, although that it's happening at all is odd...

my dsl connection is a bit flakey, it goes up and down a bit. maybe because my house is 80 years old and the wiring's shot, maybe because dsl just got turned up in my area a couple weeks ago, anyways...

whenever my router is offline, a router/modem combo provided by verizon, linux gets _very_ slow and pausey, like i've explained. it seems when dns is down the machine gets buggy. you would think linux would be able to get around this without a hiccup, much less huge pauses with no apparent movement.

can anyone explain this?

no ideas? seems mandrake (or linux in general?) should be able to perform even if a router goes down, even the DNS server and gateway. am i expecting too much?

I have noticed at times that both Mandrake 9.1 and Redhat 9.0 become very slow (bringing up applications, logging off, etc.). My machine is fine 1.6ghz 30gig 512K Ram. After looking around on message boards, etc. it seems that both are slowed down by hostname resolution. I placed my hostname and ip in the hosts file, and made sure my hostname was set correctly, place the hostname in the network file (HOSTNAME=xxxxx). Now every runs much faster. Just a thought.