Hi
After I have entered my user and password, for 4 minutes I see only my wallpaper and the bars, no icon. I must wait this long time to be able to launch anything from the bars.
How can I find what is wrong ?
Thanks
So let me get this clear -- you type your username and password, the computer logs you in; quickly enough the desktop background is drawn and the two panels appear (one at the top and one at the bottom of the screen); no desktop icons appear and possibly some if not all of the panel items, such as the menu, are notably missing for 4 minutes, thus preventing you from using the computer until the 4 minutes elapses?
Can you think of any notable changes that you have made to the system, hardware or software, shortly before this problem first appeared? In my experience this is most often caused by the BIOS / UEFI / firmware in the system losing your system settings; usually the cause specifically is the BIOS assuming that a floppy drive is present when in reality it's not, and thus the operating system spends eons waiting for the floppy drive to respond -- but to no avail, since the floppy drive doesn't exist.
If disabling the floppy drive doesn't work, listen out and determine whether the computer just sits there idle for 4 minutes, or if there's disk activity. (The disk activity indicator on the machine may be more helpful if the system has a solid-state drive or if you're hearing impaired.) Also take note if the system's fans (if any) seem to be running at a higher speed than usual. Given all that information, we still won't be able to pinpoint the problem exactly, but it'll get us in the ballpark, so to speak.
He's way past BIOS by the time the desktop loads.
Last time I saw this was on a Pi when my internet was out: caja hung for multiple minutes until it eventually timed out and finally got back to actually populating the panels and letting me have a working system.
No idea what it was trying to do (my guess is NTP) or why the timeout is so ridiculously long, but that's what happens when you have single-threaded code with an assumption that everything it tries to do will always complete "quickly".
I don't think you understood my point. Sure, the BIOS itself doesn't help the kernel out once the desktop has loaded. But the kernel often finds out that the system "has a floppy drive" by looking at the list of drives that the BIOS populates. So I've actually seen several instances where the desktop freezes for 30 or more seconds due to this, and I know it's caused by this, because when I then disable floppy drives in the BIOS the system boots at normal speed.
Still, it's in some ways more likely that it's a network timeout. Most new UEFI-based systems have no idea what a floppy drive is anyway, much less do they default to recognizing one.
Thanks for your answers.
I have looked into the BIOS, and don't see anything odd or to change.
The computer has no floppy and I can't disable it in the BIOS.
I have recently reinstalled Ubuntu-Mate 20.04 LTS on a clean partition (with /home on another), It might be in relation, but I'm not sure. I suspect the delay is slowly increasing with time, that's why I didn't noticed it immediately after... I will measure it more accurately. But I'm sure the same problem was not existing previously with Ubuntu 18 and Gnome on the same partitions and BIOS.
I think there is a disk activity after login and until the links are shown on the desktop.
Maybe something is running with high priority, but how can I find what ?
Regards
I searched on ubuntu: how to investigate slow boot times and got lots of pages.
Please see -
Using our search on this site, I got -
Good luck @tintinux
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Thanks mdooley for your hints.
But systemd-analyze looks like useful for slow boot, and my issue is slow login.
BTW : does e-mail notification work on this forum ? not for me with a correct e-mail address and notifications enabled...
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