[ubuntu-za] Slow Ubuntu Installation

[Charl Wentzel]

On 29/01/2013 22:46, Lee Sharp wrote:
> On 01/29/2013 02:38 PM, Charl Wentzel wrote:
>> On 29/01/2013 19:32, Lee Sharp wrote:
>>> How are you mounting the Compact Flash? How is it referred to in the
>>> BIOS? This can often be a problem, as it can detect wrong on install...
>> The Wafer has a built-in CF card slot. It is specifically designed for
>> the purpose of acting as a hard drive.
>>
>> In the BIOS it is shown as "PATA - Innodisk", with Innodisk being the
>> manfucturer.
>>
>> PS: this is Industrial CompactFlash, not the normal consumer type
>
> Some CF media has odd architecture, or reports it oddly. You mght try 
> a different CF card... Or, turn off the nic in the BIOS and see if 
> that changes things.
Thanks, Lee.

I tried two different CF cards yesterday, an Industrial 32GB CF card and 
an older Sandisk 8GB CF card, both gave the exact same result. So the 
problem is not the physical CF cards.

The BIOS does not allow me to disable the NICs (there are two). Not sure 
how to bypass this.

I noticed something else that is odd though. Once I booted the device 
(and waited to get logged in), I started "top" in that terminal. Nothing 
was "hogging" the processor.
I then logged in on another virtual terminal and watched what happened 
in top. The login in process took just as long and serveral processes 
were fired up during the login; "login", "bash" and a few others in 
between. In each case the CPU usage by that process went to 100% while 
it was running. Nothing seemed particularly odd except for the duration. 
Why would "bash" run for 20 seconds at 100% CPU usage before giving me a 
login prompt?
I tried a few other commands such as "ls" and "nano". Although slow, 
they started/finished quite quickly. "sudo" was another command that 
took a long time to execute.

So I don't get it. It seems that the applications themselves execute 
slowly despite the fact that they are running at 100% CPU. If they were 
waiting for something else then they wouldn't consume 100% CPU. There 
also doesn't seem to be a hidden processor hog.

Any fresh ideas?