when I was trying to boot linux, it stops for a while on the nfsstatd and cups part, and it stop for a long time in sendmail and sm-client part, then when everything it says ok, but then it took a long tme to display the login screen.

After I have logged in, everything seems to be so slow, and something weird happens, when I clicked on licq, it gives me terminal, and if i am lucky enough, I can start licq, but could not get online, everthing is so messed up, and when i was trying to logged out, it gives me the web browser.

can someon ehere help me plz, did I messed up something, the day before this is happening, I was trying to do some ssh port fowarding, i am not good with it, just doing experiment arround, did i just mess up the system by that?

just an addon, everytime my linux start, two xstart window will pop up. amsn start out by itself, which is not the case before, I had to click on the msn icon.

man this sux, no one is replying

It's a safe bet you blew away your machines protocol stack........

I am just playing with some port fowarding how would that be possible to blew my machien stack?

It sounds like your network configuration is messed up. I had this problem a long time ago and if I remember correctly my hostname or localhost address was incorrect in some config file and each time it looked up my hostname via networking it would look for the incorrect thing and then have to wait for a timeout before proceeding.

My machine was dead slow with almost everything.

Hope this helps.

James.

Try adding ".localdomain" versions of each host name in your /etc/hosts file.
BEFORE
127.0.0.1 localhost
192.168.1.1 firewall
192.168.1.102 bobby

AFTER
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
192.168.1.1 firewall.localdomain firewall
192.168.1.102 bobby.localdomain bobby

This worked for me. Sendmail starts very quickly now (on RedHat 8 and 9 systems) and X programs that were very slow in launching now come up rapidly.