X startup very slow

[m_yates]

I installed Knoppix v. 3.3-11-19-2003 to the hard drive of a laptop computer with 192 MB RAM and a Pentium III 900 MHz processor. It has an ATI rage mobility M4 graphics. I edited sources.list to US debian unstable repositories and ungraded everything to debian unstable. Here is the problem: the boot up is exceptionally slow. Particularly X startup. I timed the startup. Starting from the time "starting kdm" appears as a boot message until I have a kdm login screen is 1 minute and 20 seconds. During that time, there is lots of hard drive seeking.

Does that time seem normal for this machine? Is there anything I can look for to try and speed it up?

[Stephen]

I installed Knoppix v. 3.3-11-19-2003 to the hard drive of a laptop computer with 192 MB RAM and a Pentium III 900 MHz processor. It has an ATI rage mobility M4 graphics. I edited sources.list to US debian unstable repositories and ungraded everything to debian unstable. Here is the problem: the boot up is exceptionally slow. Particularly X startup. I timed the startup. Starting from the time "starting kdm" appears as a boot message until I have a kdm login screen is 1 minute and 20 seconds. During that time, there is lots of hard drive seeking.

Does that time seem normal for this machine? Is there anything I can look for to try and speed it up?

Go to Kano's script page and get the fix-fonts.sh and in the directory you downloaded it too use chmod +x fix-fonts.sh and then ./fix-fonts.sh these steps best done from a console login as normal user then using su to become root then use /etc/init.d/kdm restart to restart the X server and get a new kdm greeter screen.

[m_yates]

Thanks Stephen,

I don't know what black magic the script does, but it has improved startup time a good bit. It is still a little slow, but that may be normal for a 4200 rpm disk with an older processor.

[Stephen]

Thanks Stephen,

I don't know what black magic the script does, but it has improved startup time a good bit. It is still a little slow, but that may be normal for a 4200 rpm disk with an older processor.

X spends all kinds of the time searching for font.dir files and paths that are not there that fixes it you should still check in the /var/log/XFree86.0.log and make sure it did not miss anything and if necessary comment out the FontPath in the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 or change to the directory where it says there is no font.dir and run mkfontdir as root. You might also want to check that you have DMA enabled with hdparm /dev/hda as root in a console window and if it is not enabled then hdparm -d1 /dev/hda and to make the change for the next time you boot edit the file /etc/hdparm.conf and uncomment the lines for the example near the bottom of the file like this.

## Uncommented by me
/dev/hda {
#       mult_sect_io = 16
#       write_cache = off
        dma = on
}