Hello!

When i start Xterm (or another terminal in X, tried others; aterm & rxvt), it appears very quickly on the screen, but it takes a while (4-5 seconds) before 'kevschef@debian:~$' appears, and i can start using it. After that it works normally, but its really annoying and slowing down my work because i start a lot of xterms Btw i'm running Debian testing. Everything else is fast as normal.

Does anyone know what causes this delay? I tried searching i could not think of good keywords.

Thanks!

The problem is most likely something in your shell config. If you can't figure out what it is, then lob a 'set -x' at the top of ~/.bashrc (or whatever), this should show you what it's doing.

Great! Thanks alot soggycornflake for the quick awnser. I had a look at .bashrc, and it seems its doing ALOT before starting. I'll see into this, i wonder what its for.

Thanks again, it seems to work well if i empty the file, but ill look into the file later to see what i will be missing in that case.

No problem.

It's usual to have a fair amount of stuff in there, most of it doesn't cause any slow-down (aliases for example shouldnt' be any problem, I have a couple of hundred). Obviously, if you're running a lot of external commands, that's going to takes it's toll. Another thing that can slow it down, depending on how fast your box is, is if you have a large HISTSIZE (the number of lines stored in the history file). On my main box (Athlon 64), I have a nice large 10,000 lines, but on my old laptop (PII-300), I cut this down to 2,000, otherwise it takes ridiculously long to start a shell.