Where to look when the system crashes or something else horrible goes down?

6

1

My Linux Mint workstation is acting funky, it appears to be logging me out randomly, though I'm guessing what's really happening is that the X desktop is crashing. Maybe.

How do I troubleshoot this?

I'm not sure which log file to look at. I tried looking at dmesg and Xorg.log in /var/log but I'm not sure what to look for. Not to mention there are no conventional timestamps, but a string like [ 0.416674] and I have no idea what that means.

CaptSaltyJack

Posted 2011-08-09T21:44:54.973

Reputation: 1 515

Well, do not use X for a while, and check if the system still acts "funky". It is high time time get used to the console :-) And if you have gazillion times, install a second OS, say, Ubuntu besides Mint and check if that fails as well (just to stay in the field of comparative bugfixing) – karatedog – 2011-08-09T21:48:34.533

1Not really practical advice unfortunately. I have work to do and it relies on using X/Gnome. Plus it's entirely random so I can't really predict when it'll show up. – CaptSaltyJack – 2011-08-09T21:58:44.257

Are you applying all available updates? – LawrenceC – 2011-08-09T22:05:59.530

@ultrasawblade Within reason. Using mintUpdate only, not using apt-get and installing kernel updates, etc. But yes, everything is up to date. – CaptSaltyJack – 2011-08-09T22:10:15.007

I'd grep your logs for "error". dmesg, /var/log/syslog, Xorg.log seem like good places to start. If push comes to shove, I'd try doing another Linux install in parallel in an effort to see if it's a hardware problem. You should probably run memtest86 too... – James T Snell – 2011-08-09T22:10:15.880

Urgh. Known bug in Ubuntu and unresolved. Awesome. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/778490

– CaptSaltyJack – 2011-08-09T22:34:37.643

Answers

3

After doing some research, seems like (for whatever reason), any recent X crashes show up in /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old

CaptSaltyJack

Posted 2011-08-09T21:44:54.973

Reputation: 1 515

I guess that the .old log file relates to a terminated X11 session, because the new (currently running) one has to log stuff somewhere too. – unfa – 2017-05-23T14:40:53.013

2

These four files are your best bet.

/var/log/Xorg.0.log

/var/log/Xorg.0.log.old

~/.xsession-errors

/var/log/messages

SleighBoy

Posted 2011-08-09T21:44:54.973

Reputation: 2 066

1Those log files are rather large, use last |head -n 50 to get the timestamps of your crashes to save your self a lot of reading. – virtualxtc – 2019-05-01T15:53:01.463

Asked: 2011-08-09T21:44:54.973

Viewed: 14 539 times

Active: 2011-11-04T04:35:27.833