Hosts not valid on bootup.

This looks like a DNS problem on your internet connection to me. DStar Commander does wait until it sees a working internet connection before it starts the gateway...the fact that the DCS reflectors didn't load from the host file suggests that it can't resolve the host names in the file due to a DNS issue.

Regards

It waits for a ping to google.com to succeed

Regards

DStar Commander does a wget to retrieve the google.com homepage, to be precise. I note also that in the example you posted above, the APRS server address was resolved, resulting in a successful connection, while other hosts couldn't be resolved. So your DNS seems to work for some addresses (google.com, rotate.aprs2.com) and not for others (dns.xreflector.net, opendstar.org, dpns.dutch-star.eu) Hence my suspicion your DNS has some issues (but short of being completely broken). If it's just slow, you could add a sleep command to cmdprocess.py after the wget to add in an arbitrary wait period after the connection comes up. Or better still, some troubleshooting on why the DNS is so slow might be a better general solution. You might also consider switching to a third-party (free) DNS service like OpenDNS.

A while back, another user had a similar issue using a cellular hotspot built into a GM vehicle, as I recall.

Regards

Try doing a host update, reboot, host update again. After I was forced to move the primary host file server, I found a minor bug in the dvMega version that makes the hotspot drop the DPlus entries when updating from the secondary host server. A couple hostupdate-reboot cycles will fix it. Or update to 1.20 when it releases.

Regards