MDK10 Taking forever to boot up... Ideas?
 

Ok, just moved over from a Solaris 8 install to MDK10 on one of my work boxes to do some development on. Its a little older, a CPQ Deskpro PIII 700 with 380 mb ram. The solaris booted perfectly fine very quickly compared now to my MDK install which takes upwards to 20 mins to get completely booted. Does anyone have any ideas? I am still fairly new to the Linux/Unix scene, but not new to PC's in general.

MDK and Redhat/FC do take a while to boot up, although 20 mins is a bit extreme.

- Try a faster distro
- Check your init scripts,
- Recompile your kernel with only what you need. For the things you might need later, make them modules, not built-in.

There must be something weird going on. Maybe someone has a solution. I don't know if putting a noapic entry in the lilo entry would help, but try it anyway. My Mandrake installation boots within 30 seconds.

Maybe
 

A similiar problem was reported in this thread http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=160868

You might want to check it out. Mdk10 IS slower at booting, and I'm not sure the reason why. If you dont plan on adding any new hardward to your machine, you can diable that service at bootup, however, if you do add new hardware you will have to re-enable it and reboot, or just run harddrake.

Good Luck!

Thanks for the ideas guys... I will be trying some of these things. I may actually downgrade to mdk9 instead, considering how old this pc is. Thats the best part... I can blow it away and not worry!

Thanks

Ok, have tried several new things and narrowed the problem down a bit. Firstly, the pc I am putting this on is as follows:

Compaq Deskpro EN p700
384 mb ram
2 10 gb hdd's (ide)
ATI Rage pro turbo

I hunted down a copy of MDK 9.2. I installed and everything went well. I tried to keep it to a minumum to eliminate other possible problems. I also chose to boot with KDE. Well, the machine for the most part boots ok, 5 mins or so, until it starts to load KDE. When it does, the screen goes black and then to blue, and finally into KDE. The problem is this... from the time it goes black till the time it gets into KDE, I timed it out at ~27 minutes. Once I am in, things are slow to load, open and close. I have no idea what is causing it to be this dawg slow, but it is unuseable. Does anyone have any ideas/tips that could help speed the KDE load up, I would be happy with a five minute load, especially if the apps and screens load faster once in KDE.

Thanks...

Also, I ran top once I was in KDE with a terminal window... None of my swap was in use and I still had about 128mb ram free. My cpu was running generally around 10% and things within KDE were still loading extreemly slow. I am lost now... there doesnt seem to be any obvious problems with things loading/using all the resources, so I am not sure what is going on. I am running an FTP and Telnet server, but these seem to load and work fine. The speed problems seem to only be in KDE.

I don't know, you are one unlucky puppy. I have a celeron 900, 256 megs of ram, Asus Cusi-m mobo. Mandy 10 boots to X in less than 30 seconds. Mandy 9.1, 2 or 3 more. First start of KDE in a day takes about um.. lets see, I thinks between 10 and 20 seconds.
I really don't know. Which service does it spend the most time on, like the one that takes up all the time and the rest start in a few questions. Or do all of the take time to load?

Oh yeah, could you post the contents of your /etc/hosts file.

I dont think that we have the same problem, but in case I have posted something which made my boottime somewhat faster

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=168110

Ok, think I figured it out, at least partially. The problem was related to KDE on that particular hardware. I never really got it working properly, so I scrapped that box and went with a different PC (faster with more ram) which is running much better. Unlike the old adage, if all else fails, get rid of it and try something new!

Try working with GNOME on the old computer and see if it helps.

I switched it to GNOME, but it was still slow as dirt. What would that mean?

IceWM? :) hehe. Or try to enter into init 3. That's a lot faster and then you can see if the problem is linux itself, or the window managers.

You gotta have something running that I think prolly shouldn't. I have a P-III 700 and its never run faster or with more power. Something's wrong. What's your NIC? Sound card? any other stuff?