GUI very slow to load
by oldFordguy from LinuxQuestions.org on (#6NN13)
Hello all,
Recently I decided to upgrade one of my PC's from Slackware 14.2 to Slackware 15.0. I did a full install with the huge kernel and KDE selected as the Desktop Environment. The install went fine, but once I booted it up I noticed that the GUI took a very long time to load (probly about 30 seconds), and once it was loaded it seemed very sluggish and unresponsive. The OS itself seems to boot and run fine, I only notice this delay when I try to load the GUI.
I thought maybe KDE was the problem, so I did a re-install and only selected XFCE for the Desktop Environment. XFCE loaded a little quicker, but not much. I then wiped it all and re-installed Slackware 14.2 just to verify that it wasn't a hardware fault, again I did a full install with the huge kernel and KDE selected for the Desktop Environment. In this case everything booted and loaded just fine without any abnormal delays.
I haven't done much to diagnose this yet, the main thing I'm curious about is whether or not anyone else has had a similar experience, and what may have changed to cause such a huge change from one OS version to the next? I have noticed that the hard drive activity light is on continuously while the GUI is trying to load. I did check the Smart data to see if the drive was going bad, but it checks out ok, and I would expect a bad drive to affect both OS versions.
I also tried installing VOID Linux to see how it performed, it had a similar but shorter delay when loading the GUI. But I don't have past experience with VOID for comparison, so just throwing that out here for what it's worth.
This is an old computer, it has a Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of RAM, and a single 2TB SATA HDD. The drive is not encrypted, it is formatted for Legacy BIOS (not UEFI) with the ext3 file system, and it has 4 partitions, /boot, /, /home, and /swap. And it is using onboard graphics.
Thanks
Recently I decided to upgrade one of my PC's from Slackware 14.2 to Slackware 15.0. I did a full install with the huge kernel and KDE selected as the Desktop Environment. The install went fine, but once I booted it up I noticed that the GUI took a very long time to load (probly about 30 seconds), and once it was loaded it seemed very sluggish and unresponsive. The OS itself seems to boot and run fine, I only notice this delay when I try to load the GUI.
I thought maybe KDE was the problem, so I did a re-install and only selected XFCE for the Desktop Environment. XFCE loaded a little quicker, but not much. I then wiped it all and re-installed Slackware 14.2 just to verify that it wasn't a hardware fault, again I did a full install with the huge kernel and KDE selected for the Desktop Environment. In this case everything booted and loaded just fine without any abnormal delays.
I haven't done much to diagnose this yet, the main thing I'm curious about is whether or not anyone else has had a similar experience, and what may have changed to cause such a huge change from one OS version to the next? I have noticed that the hard drive activity light is on continuously while the GUI is trying to load. I did check the Smart data to see if the drive was going bad, but it checks out ok, and I would expect a bad drive to affect both OS versions.
I also tried installing VOID Linux to see how it performed, it had a similar but shorter delay when loading the GUI. But I don't have past experience with VOID for comparison, so just throwing that out here for what it's worth.
This is an old computer, it has a Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of RAM, and a single 2TB SATA HDD. The drive is not encrypted, it is formatted for Legacy BIOS (not UEFI) with the ext3 file system, and it has 4 partitions, /boot, /, /home, and /swap. And it is using onboard graphics.
Thanks