Sorry - this is a long one, but I'm hoping that someone with more experience than I might have an idea about what's going on here...

I've just about completed settling into my new Fedora Core 3 install. This is a fresh install of FC3 (not an upgrade).

Everything works, but the initial startup of Gnome, as well as the startup of any subsequent programs is very slow. ... Once started, everything runs as expected (speed - wise). Read on for gory details...

I installed Fedora Core 3 - Everything. I have added the nVidia driver (although this problem pre-dates the addition of the nVidia driver). I have the standard kernel ( uname -r returns '2.6.9-1.667' ). 2.0 GHz processor, 512MB RAM and I have disabled SELinux extensions using the "Security Level" tool ( system-config-securitylevel ). I have also disabled IPv6 by adding options to modprobe.conf (( alias net-pf-10 off ) & ( alias ipv6 off ))

And for the record, this: '' kill -USR1 $(pidof cpuspeed) '' does not change the startup times...

From GDM graphical login (after the login screen disappears):
- 1:49 before the RedHat/Gnome Startup splashscreen appears
- 2:40 before the splashscreen disappears
- 2:45 Gaim login appears
- 3:05 'Gnome Foot', Applications, Actions first appear
- 4:20 Theme background and desktop icons appear (system is usable)

Then, I can start Applications>Games>TuxRacer
The screen goes black immediately, but the music and menu don't appear for 45 seconds.
Once the menu is up, I can run through the courses very smoothly, and everything seems to run fine.

In summary, the first time I start each program, after a login, the program starts slowly - subsequent runs of the same program, and the actual running of the program is normal. I did not have the same problems with FC2 or RedHat 9 (both on the same box).

Try running the services readahead and readaheadearly. They are supposed to make things load quicker. Maybe that will help. You have some snail speed loading times.

Did you run 'top' and see what is consuming all your CPU?

Both readahead and readahead_early are running (by default). Thanks for the idea though. I really had hoped that disabling the SElinux would help. Quite annoying.

My CPU is near dead [edit: dead is a poor choice, how about asleep ]. (Not more that 20 percent during this time). Perhaps it's Disk I/O bound, any idea how to best check that?

My guess is you might have a bad hard drive.

Speaking of hard drives (This is a dual-boot WinXP laptop - and I don't have HDD issues there), I notice that there's a SMART monitor daemon. Maybe I'll try disabling that (if it's trying to watch IDE activity, it could be slowing things down).

I can't really offer any help, but I need to know how you installed the nvidia driver on FC3. Thanks.

Please check to see if your drives are using PIO mode or DMA mode. That sounds like what is going on.

Here's a link to help with Nvidia driver installation. It worked for me.....

http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthr...NVIDIA+Install

The only problem I had was trying to enter init 3 to install. It wouldn't work from a shell without totally blacking out my screen with no prompt .... so I had to edit my /etc/inittab to run at level 3 by default, reboot and do my install, startx to see if it worked ... then re-edit /etc/inittab to run level 5.

Hope this helps!

~Jim

Thanks a lot vanshark! For the record, I didn't have to do the rpm -e --nodeps xorg-x11-Mesa-libGL step.

I have the same issue with fedora core being slow. In my case I have a dell Inspiron and it only contains linux. It is not a dual boot. To see if it was a hard drive issue I installed Fedora Core 2 and the problem went away.

Any help would be appreaciated.

Felix

While browsing the group I saw a similar issue. Different distro but the same idea...Here is a link to the thread. Unfortunatly havent had the time to try it.

But in any case here is the link...

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=256441


Felix

This was resolved - but it sucked... Turns out it was a bad motherboard. I replaced the motherboard and everything is fine. I had no idea that something like this could happen (Bad MoBo makes things slow, but not dead). (shrugs).