I use Linux Mint 16 Xfce on my Asus Eee PC netbook. Whenever I switch to a console (Ctrl + Alt + F[something]) and login, it takes forever for the bash prompt to appear. Entering my user name and password is pretty quick, but then it hangs at that "Last login: whatever" line for about 30 seconds, then the bash prompt finally appears. How can I speed this up?

This might be a memory problem. How much memory do you have? Do you have a swap partition?

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Steve Stites

I've got 1 GB memory and a 1 GB swap partition. I had changed the swappiness from 60 to 20 to improve performance a bit. According to the Xfce Task Manager, I usually only have about 8 KB in swap, so I don't really think swapping is an issue.

One thing I've noticed is that once I log in to one text console, logging in to other consoles happens instantaneously. This problem only happens on the first console login after a reboot.

The console programs are re-entrant. That means that the code can be used by several threads simultaneously. When you start the first console the console code has to be loaded into memory. When you start subsequent consoles the code is already loaded and available. The question is why does it take so long to load the console code. If you have changed swappiness and/or fixed the memory size allocated to cache you may have left a very small amount of free memory. In that case Linux may have to page out some programs in order to get the room to load the console program. Just a guess.

You have enough memory that you should not have a problem with loading programs. I suggest that you set all parameters affecting memory usage back to the defaults and see if you still have the problem.

You also might try loading other large programs as the first thing loaded after boot and see if they also have the problem.

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Steve Stites