Hello,

I've had a lot of fun with Debian Sarge over the weekend, learning a whole ton of networking and other configuration stuff to compensate for its <BLEEP> installer. Someday soon I shall be ready for Slack.

But not today.

It's not really a "lack of understanding" issue either: I've managed to get XFCE going with xdm handing sessions, something which I've never done before (Although I like KDE, but it seems bloated. Does anyone have a reasonable estimate for disk space the default install takes up?), as well as getting ALSA cooking. The "S" and "U" keys on my keyboard are almost permanently pressed.

Nah, what's been bugging me of late is how long it takes to get into X. Typical scenario: I start the computer, it boots into Linux, runlevel is set to 5, X starts. I get a blank screen for between 5-8 seconds and then I'm presented with (the rather bland) XDM login screen.

What is happening during these 5-8 seconds of darkness? It only worries me as such because Windows 2000 is somewhat snappier at that point. For comparison purposes only, you understand...

login to the CLI, then start X from there

it should take the same amount of time, but you'll see whats going on.

From where on do you assess that "w2k being snappier"
bit, please? I've never had to manually start the g00ey
in winDOHs ...


Cheers,
Tink

Okay, not literally, but if you were to consider that most of the time spent at the W2K splash loading screen is for loading the kernel and drivers, then at the end it switches the display, the change is almost instantaneous. Admittedly it's a different beast, does things back-to-front from a nix perspective, but still...

And yes SciYro, I did originally start X from the CLI before XDM was in place, it does show some information (Mostly warnings about deprecated config statements, but that's Deb for you ) but it quickly changes the display mode and sits there as described before I can take it in. Is there a log file I can check?

Two, actually ... there's the system global one:
/var/log/Xorg.0.log (or XFree86.0.log, respectively)
and the user one ~/.xsession-errors (which, despite
the name, doesn't contain errors alone ;-}) ...


You answered your own question :) ... in windblows
the drivers are loaded BEFORE the graphical env
comes up - X has to pull its own drivers up, plus
the overhead for extras like network transparency
and others ;0


Cheers,
Tink

Yes, I find I do that a lot with Linux. It makes sense, in a "but doesn't it do it like this?" way.

I still think spending around 5 seconds with nothing to go on is a bit like being blind and standing in the middle of a road. You wouldn't know if it'd crashed until time's up (Or a car hits you, in the euphemism ). Is it possible to (easily) hack a little "Loading..." message into it?