Gnome start-up hesitation

[dln]

ZCS 5.0.8 for RHEL5_64 on CentOS 5.2

When the (smallish=1GB RAM) system cold starts the Gnome start-up routine rolls through the thermometer and when that disappears there is only a blue screen for three-four minutes (quite long enough for a sense of deja-M$ to steal over me) before the logon panel is displayed. Is this because there is so much going on to set up the servers (disk activity is only heavy for first part of this period), or is there a problem in the relationship with Gnome?

I can see nothing meaningful in the logs, but am no Linux guru and this is my first Zimbra install/evaluation effort. When this first happened I figured that I had done something stupid, so I reinstalled CentOS from bare metal, installed the pre-reqs for Zimbra, and stopped the unwanted services, and then brought the software up-to-date. At various moments, eg changing hostNM and networking, I rebooted and cold-started the machine to see if/when the start-up hesitation is actually introduced. The 'only' change to the machine between 'works' and 'hesitates' was installing Zimbra.

Any and all advice will be appreciated...
=dn

[phoenix]

You don't really say what specification your machine is but the likelihood is that lack of RAM is the problem (and running a graphical desktop on a server with limited RAM won't help).

[dln]

It's an AMD Athlon 3000+ with 1GB RAM, as mentioned - so not far above/at Zimbra's recommended minimum for "evaluation".

As long as there's no inter-relationship problems between various software components then the situation is bearable for an evaluation - we're not looking at load testing or production use at this stage.

Regards,
=dn