Caesarean Rhapsody

If you use Ubuntu on your laptop (and why not?) you maybe facing or may have faced this problem. But fikar not, here’s the solution.

Scenario:

You user wireless/wired network to conenct to your company network. Suddenly one day you are asked to travel and you take the laptop with you. While traveling you find that any application you open takes at least 1 or 2 minutes to spawn. You are stumped. You log on to the network and find that nobody has had this problem. You disable Compiz and desktop effects but still no improvement.

Solution:

Open /etc/hosts in your favorite editor.

sudo vim /etc/hosts

The 1st two lines read

127.0.0.1 <hostname>

127.0.0.1 <hostname>.<domainname>

Change the second line to

127.0.0.1 <hostname>

And voila you’re good to go

And what’s better, unlike, Winblows you don’t have to restart

Reason:

The way Ubuntu is built I think it tries to reach the network to check the existance of your username everytime a command is executed. Even if you’re running some application from the GUI it means a command is spawning the application in the background console. To verify this, even before you make the above changes, fire up a terminal and try spawning an application. After some time you’ll notice a “username not found” kind of error and then the application starts. This means the OS tried to search for the username on the network and upon failing finally launches the app. But this removal of domainname should fix the problem.