I've used Slackware with blackbox for quite a few years.
Occasionally startx will take longer than 5 seconds to start X, but most of the time X will start in less than a second.

This occurs on more than one computer, so it's not unique.

Anyone have an idea why?

Also, another mystery is the many blank lines in the startx executable. Can they be removed?

Thanks for any help.

One thing I was noticing for a while is that startx (I think via the xinitrc) attempts to establish the hostname/domainname. It appears that the function that does this (I think it's hostname) doesn't necessarily honor what is set in /etc/host.conf as far whether to check for hostname locally or attempt to get the domain name from the name server.

In /etc/host.conf, the following line is supposed to indicate that it should first check /etc/hosts and if that doesn't work, then check the name server.

However, I have noticed that it seemed to go straight to BIND. What this means is that if the machine is not connected to the network (or the nameserver is otherwise unresponsive), startx sits there and waits until hostname times out and falls back to checking locally.

I don't think I've noticed this with 14.1, but it definitely was occurring for me on my last machine with 14.0.

Dave

Yes, there is some odd behavior of "hostname -f" always doing a DNS query (something to do with IPV6, I believe) and this will cause startx to hang for about 10 seconds if your PC isn't connected to the network (or can't reach a DNS server, or some other DNS problem I suppose).

Anyone who uses an X environment (rather than console) nearly all the time, and is often either off-net or has a flakey DNS, should consider changing to initial runlevel 4 and boot right into xdm. This does not have the problem that startx does, and works just fine when off the network.