Looong boot up time

[sbradley07]

I am trying to figure out why it takes so long to boot my machine.

Right after the Boot Menu, I see a message that says "Starting up" then "Loading...please wait." Right after that, my screen goes black except for a monitor message that says "1: Analog Input. Cannot display this video mode". It takes a 1.5 to 2 minutes before I see the "Start KDE" message. Then I log in, all the services load, and I finally am up. The whole process takes 3+ minutes. Is this normal?

When the screen is black, I can hear processor activity...but then nothing for quite some time. It seems like it's waiting on something, but I can't tell what it is without output to the screen. I removed the "quiet" option in menu.lst, but that only gives me about 2 seconds worth of screen output before the screen goes black.

Anyone else have this problem?

[Snowhog]

Re: Looong boot up time

Are you on a desktop PC? What type of monitor cable connection are you using?

[sbradley07]

Re: Looong boot up time

Yes on a desktop. Using a VGA cable to a Dell 1704FPVt monitor. Display settings are 1280x1024 at 60hz.

[dibl]

Re: Looong boot up time

The whole process takes 3+ minutes. Is this normal?

Anyone else have this problem?

I just finished updating a relative's Feisty system, to Gutsy, so I had the opportunity to do a couple of boots. Her monitor gives a similar message "Frequency out of Range" -- I think this is the same message from the monitor as your "Cannot display this video mode" -- it simply means the monitor is not receiving a valid signal.

3 minutes sounds a little longish, but not unreasonable for a normal boot sequence. Apparently the "quiet" option is on your kernel boot instruction, so you are denied the satisfaction of observing hundreds of lines of text messages flying up the screen during those couple of minutes -- that is why it seems so long. If you'd rather watch the messages go by, you could open the file /boot/grub/menu.lst with your Kate editor in Super User mode, and remove the "quiet" option, and save the edited file. At the next boot, it will be more interesting.

[sbradley07]

Re: Looong boot up time

I don't have the "quiet" option enabled. When it was enabled, I saw nothing after the first "starting up" message. WIth it disabled, all I see is about 2 seconds worth of output before everything goes dark. Would changing the display settings to a much smaller resolution have any effect?

[dibl]

Re: Looong boot up time

There are many, many kernel boot options, and I don't know enough about your system to know which would present the character-mode text during the boot process. A common one is "vga=791". You also might remove the "splash" option, at least for a test run to see what's happening during the boot process. I'm thinking that if you observe a specific "hangup" at a point in the process, there might be an issue to look into. On the other hand, if it simply takes 3 minutes to do everything it needs to do on your system, then that's your normal boot time.

Among other things, I assume you are aware that every so many boots of an ext3 filesystem, there is a mandatory fsck that takes a few minutes extra.

[Snowhog]

Re: Looong boot up time

If you want, post your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file for our review. We might be able to tell you more after reviewing it.

[sbradley07]

Re: Looong boot up time

I removed the "splash" option, and now I see all the output as it boots up. One mystery solved.

Everything was moving pretty quickly, until it got to "Configuring Network Interfaces". It hung there for more than a minute.

A little history here: the PC I loaded Kubuntu on is a Pentium 3 2mghz w/512mb RAM. While it has an ethernet card, I connect to my home network via a Linksys WUSB11v4...so I am not using Ethernet at all. One of the first things I did after installing the OS was to work on getting my wi-fi working. Pouring thru this site and the Ubuntu forums, I was able to get my network working using ndiswrapper. However, I ran into an issue where I could only get it working AFTER the OS booted, by manually typing in commands at the Konsole. Whenever I rebooted, the OS would come up with out wi-fi.

At the Konsole, when I typed "sudo ifup wlan0", the response I got was "ifup: interface wlan0 already configured"

But if I did a "sudo ifdown wlan0", followed by a "sudo ifup wlan0", my wi-fi would start working

I found a thread that discussed the same issue here ( http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=281173 ). In that thread, one of the posters created a simple script, and I used that method to issue the ifdown/ifup sequence automatically. I know that's a work-around, but it's been working great

Now I am wondering if this is what's slowing down my boot up process. Also, since I don't use Ethernet, is there a way I can disable that so it doesn't try to load that when booting? Is my funky wi-fi hack causing the slow boot?

[dibl]

Re: Looong boot up time

Everything was moving pretty quickly, until it got to "Configuring Network Interfaces". It hung there for more than a minute.

Aha! Yep, I think your wi-fi hack, or some consequence of it, is holding up the boot process. But, if it works as configured, I wouldn't be too eager to tinker with it -- we see a lot of problems worse than slow boots on this forum!

I'm not sure if ethernet is something you really want to disable -- I'm not enough of a wireless engineer to say whether ethernet service is used underneath the wireless signal. In KMenu>System Settings>Advanced>System Services you have the ability to view and modify available services. Be careful -- if you disable a critical one, you might not get to run your system again to fix it.

[Snowhog]

Re: Looong boot up time

What type of wireless adapter do you have in your system? Broadcom or Atheros? If you don't know, open a console and type:

sudo lspci | grep Ethernet

and

ifconfig

and post.

[sbradley07]

Re: Looong boot up time

steve@basement:~$ sudo lspci | grep Ethernet
02:0a.0 Ethernet controller: D-Link System Inc RTL8139 Ethernet (rev 10)
steve@basement:~$ ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:05:5D:4FD:58
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:3 Base address:0x2c00

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:1 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:1 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:112 (112.0 b) TX bytes:112 (112.0 b)

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:12:17:95:85:B0
inet addr:192.168.1.102 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::212:17ff:fe95:85b0/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:969 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:729 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:1010501 (986.8 KB) TX bytes:121831 (118.9 KB)

steve@basement:~$

[Snowhog]

Re: Looong boot up time

Okay, the lspci | grep Ethernet only shows your hardwire ethernet controller. Run the following command:

lshw

Scroll to the top of the listing, and then start scrolling down. You are looking for the first occurrence of *-network
Copy and paste the description, product, and vendor lines. Continue scrolling down until you come across the second occurrence of *-network
Copy and paste the description, product, and vendor lines.

This will let us know what type of ethernet and wireless products you have.

[sbradley07]

Re: Looong boot up time

1st:
*-network
description: Ethernet interface
product: RTL8139 Ethernet
vendor: D-Link System Inc
physical id: a
bus info: pci@0000:02:0a.0
logical name: eth0
version: 10
serial: 00:05:5d:4f:dd:58
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: bus_master cap_list ethernet physical
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=8139too driverversion=0.9.28 latency=64 maxlatency=64 mingnt=32 module=8139too multicast=yes

2nd:
*-network
description: Wireless interface
physical id: 1
logical name: wlan0
serial: 00:12:17:95:85:b0
capabilities: ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=ndiswrapper+wusb11v4 driverversion=1.45+Cisco-Linksys LLC.,05/13/20 ip=192.168.1.102 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11b

(there were no Product or Vendor lines in the 2nd network output. I pasted it as it appeared in my console)

[Snowhog]

Re: Looong boot up time

2nd:
*-network
description: Wireless interface
physical id: 1
logical name: wlan0
serial: 00:12:17:95:85:b0
capabilities: ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=ndiswrapper+wusb11v4 driverversion=1.45+Cisco-Linksys LLC.,05/13/20 ip=192.168.1.102 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11b

Based on your statement that you have a Linksys WUSB11v4, the underlined information above is a match. So your action on configuring using ndiswrapper isn't/shouldn't be the problem.

So now, let's take a look at your /etc/network/interfaces file:

cat /etc/network/interfaces

Copy and paste for review.

[sbradley07]

Re: Looong boot up time

auto lo
~$ cat /etc/network/interfaces
iface lo inet loopback
address 127.0.0.1
netmask 255.0.0.0


iface eth0 inet dhcp

iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wireless-essid dd-wrt
wireless-key1 xxxxxxxxxx

auto wlan0