On Wed, 2007-05-23 at 08:39 -0700, Lan Barnes wrote:

> Usually /var/log/messages. I often zero it with:
> 
>   cat /dev/null>/var/log/messages
> 
> Have to be root to do that. 

If I understand correctly what this command is doing 
(empty the /var/log/messages file?), 
it is the last thing Bill wants to do, 
because it would get rid of the error messages that he saw during
installation, which probably still exist in some log file,
maybe /var/log/messages  
(well, it's somewhat hard to be root in ubuntu, anyway). 

Then again, I may misunderstand the cat command, and you may redirect
everything that usually goes to /dev/null (i.e. the official Unix
write-only memory) to /var/log/messages instead. 

I tried (unsuccessfully) to identify the messages related to my sound
card in the log files, and noticed that ubuntu keeps a lot of messages.
>From time to time, it seems to gzip (for newbies: compress a file using
the gzip tool; type 
man gzip 
in a terminal to see details) the existing messages and start a new log
file. Rather nice if something goes wrong and you want to be able to
trace back how things _started_ to go wrong quite a while before you
noticed. 

lspci | grep udio
gets me the line that refers to my audio controller (it says "Audio",
not "audio", so I need to omit the first letter when searching).

> Also you can use tail on the file to see the
> latest stuff. tail -f will do a live tail so you can do stuff and see the
> log messages pop up.
> 
> A wonderful source of info is dmesg.
> 
>   dmesg | less
> 
> This gives the latest poop on what the kernel is seeing, similar to the
> boot up messages.
> 
> HTH,
> 
> -- 
> Lan Barnes
> 
> SCM Analyst              Linux Guy
> Tcl/Tk Enthusiast        Biodiesel Brewer
> 

Christoph

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