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
