usually after i boot my machine, the boot messages scroll by and then i see a grayish screen with a cursor on it for a few seconds while kdm loads. then it quickly loads and i'm ready to go. i'm not exactly sure what i did but now it hangs for several minutes before a see the login manager. there's just that grayish screen with a cursor on it. it also does this when i try to use gdm. it's not just at boot either. when i end a kde session it takes several minutes for the login manager to get itself together then as well. what's the problem here?

the only thing i can think of doing since this started happening was installing some new fonts. i compiled and installed freetype-2.1.9 from source.

i've tried it again with gdm and it's actually not a problem with gdm. only kdm hangs for a few minutes.

another question:

i deleted the gdm script from /etc/init.d

how can i get that back in there?

no one here has any idea why kdm takes an extremely long time to load?

i get the xserver just fine... but i see that gray screen with the cursor for a lot longer than i should before the kdm login manager comes up. gdm works fine.

before this started happening, i did some clumsy true type font installation on the machine. searching the net for answers to the problem, i found that someone had a similar problem and it had something to do with fonts:

"I corrected this (as I posted earlier) by adding a missing truetype
parameter to my SID (KL debs) which is running xfs:

I added Truetype (/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Truetype) to the
catalogue = parameter in /etc/X11/fs/config

Your reason might be a different font but it's a good place to start
if you are running xfs or xft."

this is encouraging but i really don't know what to make of it. does this make sense, or at least look familiar, to anyone?