On 5/23/07, Christoph Maier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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).
This clears the file /var/log/messages by re-opening it and copying
nothing to the new file. Not a good thing to do if you believe that
there is some historical value to old messages.
With regard to being root in Ubuntu, the normal system setup is such
that you never have to explicitly be root, but can handle everything
that requires root privileges by using sudo(8).
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.
Old log files are renamed and new ones started under the direction of
the /etc/cron.daily/logrotate script.
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).
$ lspci | grep -i audio # grep, ignore case
> 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.
I tend to use dmesg | tail -23 which gives a screenful of what dmesg
has been doing recently.
carl
--
carl lowenstein marine physical lab u.c. san diego
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
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