Hey all,

I just tried loading a 2MB file in gedit and it silently died on me. I was wondering if anything might appear in a log file that might help me diagnose this: I checked syslog and found out it segfaulted. While doing this I realised that I don't really know anything about how logging is organised on *nix machines.

All I know at the mo is

1. Logs are typically stored in /var/log/... is there anywhere else that I should know about?

2. I'm familiar with application specific logs, such as apache's.

3. I understand that dmesg is the bootup log, and syslog is a general system log... is that right?

So would someone mind taking me through the most useful logs? Are the two logs I mention in the final point the only general logs? And what are the funky numbers at the start of lines in dmesg? Seconds since startup?

Please include anything in your answers that you think would improve my understanding here and help me track down anomalies!

TIA

Andy