I'm running KDE 3.1 on a slow machine (160MHz PA-RISC CPU) and noticed, that during startup of KDM krootimage is run twice and thus made the startup even slower. Since krootimage loads debian's default background image this involves a lot of graphics conversion (incl. the memory footprint) and running this application twice without any benefit makes the bootup even slower.
After some small searching, I found the reason: On debian krootimage is started by default by KDM _and_ by /etc/kde3/kdm/Xsetup: rdi:/# grep -r krootimage etc/* etc/kde3/kdm/Xresources:! another background renderer than krootimage. In this case you'll need etc/kde3/kdm/Xsetup:/usr/bin/krootimage /etc/kde3/kdm/backgroundrc & etc/kde3/kdm/kdmrc:# If true, krootimage will be automatically started by KDM. Otherwise, the etc/kde3/kdm/kdmrc:# The configuration file to be used by krootimage. /etc/kde3/kdm/kdmrc says: # If true, krootimage will be automatically started by KDM. Otherwise, the # Setup script should be used to setup the background. Default is true # UseBackground=false so changing (uncommenting) the line in /etc/kde3/kdm/kdmrc with "UseBackground" to "UseBackground=false" solved this performance problem without any regression. Could maybe someone modify the debian package to default with this variable set to false ? Thanks, Helge