I am running Ubuntu on a 64bit system.

At startup I get a full screen of errors but it scrolls too quickly to read properly. To get Thunderbird and firefox to work I sometimes have to switch off completely and restart two or three times. Is there an error logging system where I can find out what is happening?

Colin

All system errors should be viewable in the /var/log/ folder.

/var/log/messages : General log messages
/var/log/boot : System boot log
/var/log/debug : Debugging log messages
/var/log/auth.log : User login and authentication logs
/var/log/daemon.log : Running services such as squid, ntpd and others log message to this file
/var/log/dmesg : Linux kernel ring buffer log
/var/log/dpkg.log : All binary package log includes package installation and other information
/var/log/faillog : User failed login log file
/var/log/kern.log : Kernel log file
/var/log/lpr.log : Printer log file
/var/log/mail.* : All mail server message log files
/var/log/mysql.* : MySQL server log file
/var/log/user.log : All userlevel logs
/var/log/xorg.0.log : X.org log file
/var/log/apache2/* : Apache web server log files directory
/var/log/lighttpd/* : Lighttpd web server log files directory
/var/log/fsck/* : fsck command log
/var/log/apport.log : Application crash report / log file

You can read them by typing 'tail', 'less', 'more' or 'cat' (without the '') and then the name of the file you want to read in a terminal, eg:

 tail /var/log/messages

to show the last 10 (by default) system messages.

Also,

dmesg

will show you errors.

Thanks fellas, one more question, how do I clear the message file so I know which messages are new?

Colin

Thanks fellas, one more question, how do I clear the message file so I know which messages are new?

Colin

If you use 'tail' to view the files you can do it in the form of

 tail -500 /var/log/foo

to show the last 500 lines of foo or, possibly more useful is to have a terminal window open and then run

tail -f /var/log/foo

to keep the log file open and view new messages as they are generated and added to it, this is good if a program is crashing because it shows you exactly what is happening prior to the crash.