Hi all,
I have a Debian unstable box at home. My main desktop is XFCE, but my wife uses GNOME. She's been complaining of slow startup times for ages, and I've only just got around to checking it out. (I never buy her flowers, either.)
I try starting GNOME from gdm. The splash screen sits on "Desktop Settings" for about two minutes, then another two minutes or so on "Window Manager", for a total of over five minutes before I get to my desktop (on an Athlon with 256MB of RAM).
I'm assuming this is a gconf issue, mainly because gconf is alien and scary to me. My wife uses GNOME every day, and I use it once a week or so, but I'm usually out of the room while it's starting up, so I haven't noticed how ludicrous this problem has become.
Create a new user account, and GNOME starts up too fast to measure.
Anybody have any clues on where to start looking for the cause of this phenomenon? I would guess that since this machine has seen GNOME 2.2, 2.4, and now 2.6, that some garbage has accumulated in the config somewhere, but I have already resolved one GNOME problem recently by a mass deletion of dotfiles, and really don't find that a satisfactory solution. Purge-and-reinstall was a system tuning technique I thought I'd thrown out with my last proprietary OS.
Matthew.
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