Slooooooooooooooooooow motion app init

I recently went on holiday. ........Yes thanks, I had a lovely time. When I got back I turned on my machine ( Mandrake 8.1 IBM 300GL 450MHz 160ish Mb 20G). Obviously I did something to it before I left, cos it took ages to start, (esp httpd) and failed to start proftpd & squid.

Having started and logged in as me or root, if I open Konqueror, for example, it can take up to 5min to open. A few apps open normally , notably Mandrake Control Center but most take ages. I've looked at the processes running and the cache and drives seem to not be overloaded (I may be wrong). Once they're running, all the applications run at normal speed.

The main thing I've done recently is try to add a mysql database and mysql user and delete another mysql user (the latter not very successfully).

Trouble is, I'm a bit of a Linux novice and have NO IDEA where to start looking.

I keep having to reinstall instead of learning how to resolve problems, mainly because the only help I can get assumes I'm expert. So, if you're feeling extra helpful..........please spell it out in easy words?

Cheers

That's all of the ideas I have for the time being. I'll mull it over some

After takin' a swig o' grog, Noh Way Jose belched out this bit o' wisdom:

Run '/sbin/ifconfig' and see if your network card is up.

Something's wrong there. AFAIK, it isn't good practice to have both the domain and the host name set to the same name ('localhost', or at least it's potentionally confusing. I see no reason why you can't just enter in hosts:

127.0.0.1 localhost 192.168.0.1 myhost.atlantic.uc myhost

Of course, I'm using that static IP from the Class C range as an example. Are you using a static address from one of the 'private' ranges? Those are 10.x.x.x, 172.16.x.x, or 192.168.x.x.

Another thing to consider is: Do you have a network card installed in the machine? It that network interface using dhcp, i.e. dynamically assigned IP

KDE is touchy, very touchy, about some of the things it runs unless it finds that or another hostname that it's satisfied with. Some things may continue working, but most just die right away. I remember konqueror as being one of the more sensitive (I don't use KDE, just some apps, so I'm basing a lot of memory).

Datagram from Noh Way Jose incoming on netlink socket

Install&configure&run Samba...

Mine does the same thing, and I do have Samba installed (and working properly).