Bizarre long delay at gnome startup

thoughts

When I rebooted my system today, everything looked normal, I logged in, and ran startx. The white nvidia screen flashed by as usual, and then I had the x cursor. The gnome splash screen came up, which shows icons at the bottom as it goes through the stages of gnome's startup. But none of the icons showed up.

In another VT I ran top, and could see that gnome-session, gnome-smproxy, and gnome-settings-daemon were running, but gnome-panel was not.

After about 7 minutes, all the splash screen's status icons came up and flashed by in a hurry, as usual. The splash screen disappeared and gnome-panel started. But the panel and the wallpaper never actually showed up on the screen. At this point, most of my apps seem to work (moz, thunderbird, xterm, xmms, volume control) though some did not (I tried running gedit, nothing came up, and in about 5 minutes I got an error box saying it had segfaulted).

After about 19 minutes, a Nautilus message box pops up titled "Searching Disks," and it says "Nautilus is searching your disks for trash folders."

Before all this, I had tried to use gconftool-2 to remove the trash icon from my desktop, by using this command:

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/preferences/nautilus/show_desktop false

So I tried changing that back to true and rebooting, but it didn't fix the problem.

Back on VT1, I see this error from X, printed twice in a row:
Symbol __glXActiveScreens from module /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions/libdri.a is unresolved!

And under that, it says:
(II) [GLX]: Initializing GLX extension

So I recompiled my kernel and re-emerged nvidia-drivers and nvidia-glx, but that didn't help. I disabled glx and dri in XF86Config, but that didn't help. I tried switching to the nv driver instead of nvidia, but that also didn't help.

To make sure it wasn't some problem with my gnome configuration in my home directory, I created a new user and ran startx with him. He had the same problem.

I tried renaming /usr/bin/nautilus to /usr/bin/somethingelse in case it was a nautilus problem... didn't help.

I re-emerged gnome, but that didn't help either.

My system isn't slow (PIII 850MHz / 512MB) and in any event, the CPU was mostly idle during this long delay.

I'm running out of ideas here... anyone have any?

Thanks,
Anthony
http://nodivisions.com/

thoughts · Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2004 1:15 am Post subject:

I emerged kde and changed my ~/.xinitrc from "exec gnome-session" to "exec kdeinit". Now startx switches to VT7, shows a black background and the X cursor, and sits there for about 5 minutes before dying and switching back to VT1. There, I have this error printed twice in a row:

kded: WARNING: KGenericFactory: instance requested but no instance name passed to the constructor!

Then it says:

waiting for X server to shut down kdeinit: Fatal IO error: client killed

Then kdeinit sends SIGHUP and then SIGTERM to its children and I'm dumped back at the prompt.

So... it looks like an X problem and not a gnome/kde problem.

-Anthony
http://nodivisions.com/

thoughts · Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2004 2:06 am Post subject:

Well, apparently, metacity isn't starting; I have no idea why, when it's always started before today. So I just added "metacity &" to my ~/.xinitrc before "exec gnome-session" and now when I startx, the X cursor changes to an arrow almost immediately. But there's still the huge delay before gnome-panel starts, and it still never actually displays the panel on the screen, nor draws the desktop.

Come on people, help a brother out : )

-Anthony
http://nodivisions.com/

thoughts · Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2004 3:32 am Post subject:

I re-emerged both X and metacity. Didn't help. The next thing that emerges is going to be a baseball bat...

-Anthony
http://nodivisions.com/

martoni · Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2004 3:32 am Post subject:

I did a Google on
Symbol __glXActiveScreens from module /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/extensions/libdri.a is unresolved!

which turned up quite a few suggestions Perhaps one of them can help?

/M.

thoughts · Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2004 3:41 am Post subject:

aethyr · Veteran Joined: 06 Apr 2003 Posts: 1085 Location: NYC

(long program startup time = automatic question about /etc/hosts)

Have you set up your /etc/hosts correctly?

It should look similar to this:

thoughts · Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2004 4:31 am Post subject:

thoughts · Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2004 5:46 am Post subject:

This is getting ridiculous. I tried a different video card (ati instead of nvidia). No change.

I unmerged xfree, deleted every directory named X11 or X11R6 in /etc and /usr, then emerged xfree again. Didn't fix it.

This installation is only a week old, so it wouldn't kill me to wipe the disk and start over, but I'd rather avoid it if possible. I've installed a bunch of stuff in the past week.

From the symptoms (long delay with both gnome and kde, with newly-created user so no old config files in homedir) it sounds like an X problem, right? So why didn't the deleting-all-X-files fix it?

-Anthony
http://nodivisions.com/

thoughts · Posted: Sun Apr 25, 2004 3:41 pm Post subject:

Whew, solved! My lo (local loopback network device) service wasn't running. A little "rc-update add net.lo boot" fixed it.

-Anthony
http://nodivisions.com/

Pythagoras1 · Posted: Tue May 11, 2004 9:16 pm Post subject:

can't confirm this. my loopback daemon runs.

gnome 2.6 only starts normally if i disable the "save changes in session" option in the "sessions" control applet and delete my personal session file. if i don't do this gnome needs really long time to start up. i just found out that the same thing happens if i add custom startup apps with the "sessions" applet. whenever the custom app starts gnome waits a couple of minutes until it continues booting ... very strange.

does anyone know why saved or custom sessions don't work with gnome on none of my two gentoo boxes?

norb · n00b Joined: 22 Feb 2003 Posts: 28 Location: Cambridge, UK

I experienced the same slow startup of Gnome yesterday.
gdm worked normally but Gnome sat around with the splash window open and no icons.
Eventually it gave me a shell and mozilla, sometime later (about 5-10 mins) gkrellm appeared, followed later by the wallpaper. gnome-panel never appeared.
I'd been messing around with HOWTO: Iptables for newbies. PART II: Securing your Network https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=1038378, running the script without a second interface card and commenting out the block on broadcasting. So, yes, that might be my problem :-)

I'm going to investigate further, but found out that it seemed to be because the firewall configuration didn't allow the loopback address (127.0.0.1) to contact itself. This is fixed (maybe temporarily) by adding:

Pythagoras1 · Posted: Thu Jul 22, 2004 1:10 pm Post subject:

i don't use any firewall at all. GNOME still does take years (on all three gentoo boxes i tried it on) to start up with a custom or saved session. without any session it starts quite fine.