Update Manager dead and strange 20-second delay launching apps

[John Costella]

Hi folks,

This morning, when my laptop was offline (on the train), launching various simple applications were taking a long time to launch. When I'm online again, they launch immediately. The CPUs and disk are doing absolutely nothing during the delay; top doesn't show anything strange. Here are some examples of the delay:

Terminal: 20 seconds exactly
Gedit: 20 seconds exactly
vim from within terminal: 20 seconds exactly
gvim from within terminal: 40 seconds exactly

The only thing that changed last night was that I ran Update Manager and it installed a chunk of Gnome and other updates.

I thought it may be a bug (waiting for some network thing) that may get fixed again with another update, but now I discover that Update Manager is dead. (When I press Check, it goes grey with the spinning disc and never comes back; been waiting a long time now.) (I'm doing it now, online, of course, not offline!)

I used to be on Gutsy and updated to Hardy a few days after it was released. Everything [else] has been excellently smooth (even the laptop microphone now works!).

Thanks in advance
John

john@john:~$ uname -a
Linux john 2.6.24-17-generic #1 SMP Thu May 1 13:57:17 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Gnome desktop 2.22.1 build 07/05/08

[Delever]

Main server, selected in software sources, works for me. I don't know the reason for delays when launching applications though.

[John Costella]

Unfortunately, Software Sources seems to be dead.

When I select it from System/Administration I get a "Starting Administrative Application" minimised button on the lower system bar for about 13 seconds, which then disappears. No window appears.


Thanks
John

[Delever]

Does sudo work? Try running

sudo gedit

in terminal and check if it starts.

[John Costella]

Hmm ... it threw up a strange (new) message:

john@john:~$ sudo gedit
sudo: unable to resolve host john
[sudo] password for john:

It did launch gedit after I entered the password. It also throws up the same message when I try it again (within the sudo timeout period):

john@john:~$ sudo gedit
sudo: unable to resolve host john
[sudo] password for john:
john@john:~$
john@john:~$ sudo gedit
sudo: unable to resolve host john
john@john:~$

(and does launch gedit).

What is it trying to look up? ('john' is the local machine, as well as the username ... ambiguous, I know, but it worked ok until now.)

Thanks
John

[VK7HSE]

Hi to all...

It sounds like at some point you have changed your host name?

I managed this error a few weeks back as I had my local host called Ubuntu-710 then I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 b5 and I changed the host name to reflect the new version and the local host no longer resolved it's self!

I have no explanation for the application delays... Sorry

Scott

[sickenmcsluggets]

Yes, I had this problem as well, my /etc/hosts file had my username followed by a .domain, so like "username.domain". All I did was edit that file and delete the .domain from my username, and my update manager and all that began working again. Check out this thread...
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=723361

[John Costella]

AH! Yes, that has fixed the sudo / update manager problem!

Many thanks, VK7HSE and sickenmcsluggets!

I will check if it fixes the offline delay too -- makes sense, if it was looking elsewhere for something, and there is no elsewhere to check ...

Cheers
John

[VK7HSE]

How did you go ???

[John Costella]

Yes! That was it exactly. Many thanks.

(I don't know how to change the header of this thread to "solved"; have tried before but failed ...)

John