Magic Ubuntu Fix
Lately, my Ubuntu laptop has been driving me up the wall. Everything has been really slow to start: gnome-terminal, Firefox, emacs, you name it. I’ve tried everything I could think of and scoured the internet. I removed fonts, altered init files, changed bootscripts, etc. Then, I discovered that everything goes back to normal and works great if networking is turned off. The problem, it turns out, is that I didn’t have my hostname in the /etc/hosts file. I added my hostname “ulie” to the end of the 127.0.0.1 line and all was well with the world.