I’ve recently installed Mint on a clean partition, and set up dual booting to always prefer that partition over the Win10 one (on a separate sdd). At the moment I’m trying Mint for the very first time, seeing how I like it. And truth be told, it’s quite good! However I’ve had 2 system crashes in the last 2 days, and some games crash without an error log (old world went straight to desktop while mid-turn, and ghost of Tsushima crashed after I paused the game when pressing start).
I’d love to be more knowledgeable and figure this out by myself, but I can’t find a starting point to determine what went wrong in any of these instances.
Are there execution logs or actual error logs that I can check somewhere?
tldr journalctl
man journalctl
If you launch a process from CLI, you can redirect its standard output (stdout) and standard error (stderr) to files. Errors messages might be there.
foo >> /tmp/gamelog.out 2>> /tmp/gamelog.errMaybe the application is already saving logs or crashdumps to disk. If the game has just crashed, you can search for files modified during the last minute:
find $HOME /var/log -mmin -1That might turn up some clues on where to look.
If you have to dig deeper, look into
strace(premium subscribers only).Oh, I see now that by “crashes”, you mean your whole system freezes?
Normally you might not have kernel logs left after that. In preparation if you think it might happen and want to gather the kernel log, you can put up a shell in the background and let this run:
sudo dmesg -Tw | sudo tee -a /var/log/mykernel.log
i doubt they help, but sometimes core dump files are created when programs terminate abnormally
I think Mint uses systemd, so after rebooting, you should be able to review the system log from the previous boot with this command:
journalctl --boot=-1The kernel might still be running even when the display is frozen. If that’s the case, you can try rebooting more gently than a forced power-off would do. While holding down the
Altkey, type these keys in order, with a couple seconds between each tap:SysRqREISUBhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key
Note: SysRq is disabled by default on some distros, and unsupported by some keyboard controllers. You can check (when the system is not frozen) by holding
Altand typingSysRqHwhile watching the output ofsudo dmesg --follow. If it’s working, you should see a help message.For what it’s worth, what you’re describing sounds like it might be a GPU driver misbehaving, perhaps in response to power saving events. If you have an Nvidia card, you might try a different driver version. Otherwise, you might try an older or newer kernel version.
This is extremely helpful, thanks! Gpu is amd, as is the motherboard. I’ll be on the lookout for the next time the system freezes.