Ctrl Alt F8 in Ubuntu

Question

I'm having trouble with my Ubuntu 9.04 set up. It panics when idling (see other posts from me). It is possible, when running Ubuntu, to press Ctrl-Alt-F8 to get a console which displays messages from the system - including panic messages. I have searched the logs in /var/log for these messages but I can't find them. Are these messages written to a file anywhere since the text terminal doesn't show much history. If so, where? If they aren't written to file by default, is it possible to configure the system to write the messages to a file? Can you remote log in from another Ubuntu PC to see these messages and pipe them to a file on the remote PC?

Answer 1

Well. Depends on what kind of panic you've got. If you mean KERNEL panic, which is really serious, you can find it in /var/log/dmesg*. If you get just a simple Xorg crash/something like that, thats in /var/log/Xorg.log* . For example, you can try this: sudo cat /var/log/Xorg.log* | grep EE .. to see only error lines. You could also check the GDM log. || About the tail stuff. You can pipe them into a file. Like running an X server an user , not like a daemon. Its like this: sudo gdm --debug &> /home/user/log.txt ... IF I remember clearly. Check gdm's options. (gdm --help , or man gdm). I just used "startx &> ~/error.txt" ..since the problem was X .. not GDM exactly. (Sorry for not being sure. First, any error can hide anywhere (even if you know what type of it). And now, I don't have a Linux before me.). IF you get stuck , just ask, I'll answer/help ASAP.