20 sec waiting when starting KDE4

[SaverioB]

Hi everybody!

I'm happily using Kubuntu 8.10 on my Dell E1505 laptop.
There is now a little problem that I cannot solve.

You know that after login KDE starts loading, and you can see the blurred icon coming out while it loads all the components. Well, at the very last, when the "K" sign is being displayed, it just pause loading (the HDD is not working, for example) for 20 seconds, then it loads correctly.
I'm pretty sure it's just waiting for a time out (but maybe I'm wrong, there is something heavy to load...).

What I'm asking you is if there is a log file of KDE in which the start up process is logged. To go there and look for warnings, ecc...
How can I find out what is KDE doing when it gets stuck?

Thanks a lot,
Saverio

[CVPunk]

Re: 20 sec waiting when starting KDE4

try checking in the boot.log file.

if you can't find anything, post it here and we can maybe take a look to see if there is something odd.

[Detonate]

Re: 20 sec waiting when starting KDE4

You can edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and remove splash and quiet from the kernel line when it boots up it will show everything as they load. Might give you an idea as to what is hanging up. If you are on a network, and share files with another computer on the network, and that computer is not available at the time you boot up, it will hang for some time while trying to establish the network connection, before it gives up and moves on. Mine was hanging up on some kind of thing that had to do with acpi, in the previous kernel, but the latest kernel seems to have fixed it.

[lmilano]

Re: 20 sec waiting when starting KDE4

Two ideas. In System Settings:

1. Advanced -> Session Manager. Maybe try "start with an empry session"
2. Advanced -> Autostart -> See if there is something weird in there.

I would also like to know whether there is anything like a log file for the kde login, I am not aware of anything like that.

Hope this helps!

[SaverioB]

Re: 20 sec waiting when starting KDE4

try checking in the boot.log file.

if you can't find anything, post it here and we can maybe take a look to see if there is something odd.

I cannot find any boot.log file...
Even if I set BOOTLOGD_ENABLE=Yes
in /etc/default/bootlogd, it doesn't create boot.log in /var/log/

Are you sure that boot.log would help me, though?
The waiting time I'm experiencing happens after I enter my username and password, don't you think boot.log only logs events in the boot, until login prompt appears?

Thanks!
Saverio

[SaverioB]

Re: 20 sec waiting when starting KDE4

You can edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and remove splash and quiet from the kernel line when it boots up it will show everything as they load.

I don't have this options in /boot/grub/menu.lst (actually I don't have even any splash image, I can see everything).
But the boot process goes like a charm, it quickly gets to the login prompt.

The problem happens later, when I enter my login credentials, KDE starts and you can see the KDE icons un-blurring... is this still considered boot?

Thanks
Saverio

[LinuxIsInnovation]

Re: 20 sec waiting when starting KDE4

Did you try this?

1. Advanced -> Session Manager. Maybe try "start with an empry session"

See if this has any effect.

[SaverioB]

Re: 20 sec waiting when starting KDE4

Did you try this?

1. Advanced -> Session Manager. Maybe try "start with an empry session"

See if this has any effect.

I did try, with no effect. Yesterday the login was quick for a couple of times, but I'm not able to understand why!! Now it's the same, 20 seconds or so with the big K looking at me...

Any other idea?
Thanks!
Saverio

[LinuxIsInnovation]

Re: 20 sec waiting when starting KDE4

Try creating a new user from KUser and see if it works out for the new one.

[lmilano]

Re: 20 sec waiting when starting KDE4

Another thing to try is, if you can ssh into the machine, run top before the local login, and see if you can tell which process is hanging ... (you may also be able to get a local console early by clicling on the background to disable the splash screen and then doing [alt][F2]"konsole".

[3vi1]

Re: 20 sec waiting when starting KDE4

Mine pauses about 10 seconds at the same spot. Testing showed that it was due to my NFS shares (I guess it's looking at them for some reason). The shares are pretty huge and on another machine attached to the network via wifi.

[SaverioB]

Re: 20 sec waiting when starting KDE4

Hopefully I solved it!

Thank you very much for your assistance.

The problem was (I think, I'll doublecheck) that I had the comic strip widget on my desktop, and this widget wants to load the image from the internet before continuing.
Unfortunately this takes long, and if wireless if off it reaches a timeout.

The only solution seems to remove the widgets: no PhDComics on my desktop

Thanks again,
Saverio

[lmilano]

Re: 20 sec waiting when starting KDE4

Cool, thanks for reporting back! You may want to report this as a bug for KDE (although it may be fixed in the 4.2 branch). The comic Plasmoid should load right a way and try to get the strip on the background!

[3vi1]

Re: 20 sec waiting when starting KDE4

The problem, at least the flavor I experienced under 4.1 is fixed in 4.2.

I've been running the kde-nightly packages for a week or so, and there's no slowdown on the last splash icon under 4.2.

[perspectoff]

Re: 20 sec waiting when starting KDE4

What happens when you start in recovery mode?

Which module is hanging up at boot-up?

(Mine did this because the power manager module wouldn't load for some reason-- I had to reinstall, which fixed it inexplicably).