Reading logs after I've had to hard reboot

Question

I have a VGA to S-Video converter which I use to watch movies on the TV from my laptop, but after I've plugged it the laptop starts freezing whenever I try to suspend it or hibernate it. Can I read some log files to see what is causing this problem?

Answer 1

Logfiles are located in /var/log.

• Log files related to suspend:

  /var/log/pm-suspend.log
  

  • Older entries (# is a number):

    /var/log/pm-suspend.log.#
    /var/log/pm-suspend.log.#.gz
    

    The latter one with the .gz prefix is a compressed file and must be uncompressed before reading.

• Related to the X server (0 is the display number, it's usually 0 unless you switch users):

  /var/log/Xorg.0.log
  /var/log/Xorg.failsafe.log
  

  • Older entries:

    /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old
    /var/log/Xorg.failsafe.log.old
    

Useful commands for the terminal:

• Reads the log file and present it in a pager. You can use arrow keys, Page up/Down and Home/End to navigate. Compressed files are recognized too, there is no need to uncompress them before use:

  less /var/log/pm-suspend.log
  

• Uncompressed a file and saves it to file. The latter program (gunzip) removes the original file.gz file

  zcat file.gz > file
  gunzip file.gz
  

• Monitor logs (add new lines as they are added):

  tail -f /var/log/kern.log
  

• List log files, sorted by last modification date:

  ls -lAtr /var/log