Hi, Todd!
You should first mail to debian-user for questions like this. d-anounce
is definitely the wrong place. I left the other list adresses in for
this mail, so that people know that there was an answer to your
request. When you reply, please consider to remove some more.
I can only guess that you hosed your network setup.
Although networking is well structured, it may well look confusing to a
newbie at first.
The reason for most delays are network packets send to unknown or
unreachable hosts. Timeouts then are the only indication for the local
host that sth. is wrong and they may take a while (you wouldn't want to
loose your packets to mars because of timeouts).
The most important network inside your linux box is the unix network.
Everything else is for most installations TCP/IP networking.
Some files in the /etc directory (where all the configuration for your
machine is stored) store the basic networking configuration:
hosts - your local 'DNS'. Hostnames to IP-Numbers table. Only used when
host.conf - contains 'order host,...', see? The file
resolv.conf - at last stores adresses of name servers.
If any of your programs calls for a host by its name, this has to be
translated (looked up) into the corresponding IP number, as the network
itself doesn't know anything about names. If this lookup process is
misconfigured, the resulting timeouts make up already for quite a delay.
Now all your packets have to find their way through the network. This
is known as 'routing'. See the 'route' and 'ping' commands.
Most networking commands have an option like '-n', that makes them
output (N)umbers instead of names. Trying one and the same command that
hangs without -n once again with -n and it works, shows you clearly
that you have a problem looking up names.
KDE is communicating a lot, fix your network and retry.
You found out that networking is very important these days.
Try to read up on how this is handled with linux and the tools.
You won't have to install obscure tools then, to try to make it, hm,
work, as it did under this other non-free os ...
There are a lot of good readings on the internet. For a fine catalog
with well defined topics you might want to look at 'dmoz.org'.
This one is FREE!
Have fun! martin
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