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So my computer has lately started freezing completely when I run some programs that, in the past, would work great.

What I am unsure about however, is what logs that are available to me that could help me track down the issue after a reboot?

Thanks

Seth
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Industrial
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3 Answers3

40

Check the content of:

/your/editor /var/log/syslog

If you are running Gnome, then you can check the logs using the gnome-system-log tool (perhaps need to install with sudo apt install gnome-system-log):

gnome-system-log

You can select the syslog in the left-hand side.

If you want to check the logs as they are getting produced:

tail -f /var/log/syslog

(Not useful after crash, though, as it shows only the last few lines before following new ones)

Eric Platon
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Rajesh Pantula
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    Check the dates of the syslog* files in /var/log, my particular hang occurred on a Friday night and had been renamed and compressed as syslog.2.gz by Monday. Log was full of cntlm events, which to me means I once again left my browser with dozens of tabs opened. Thus reminding me once more that one day I need to learn how to enable the out of memory killer in Ubuntu. – TheHairyOne Mar 26 '18 at 18:26
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    What do I look for in /var/log/syslog? Any keywords? – Anna May 26 '22 at 20:09
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    gnome-system-log opens up /var/log/syslog, /var/log/auth.log, and /var/log/dpkg.log. So, what is the difference between these 3 logs and which should we look at, and when and why? – Gabriel Staples Dec 20 '22 at 21:25
  • Why use an editor (write access) to read a file? – foo Jun 27 '25 at 17:13
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If the whole machine is locking up, off the top of my head, these are the likely causes:

  • Overheating. You don't need logs to determine this, but fingers :)
  • GPU lockup. Is it an OpenGL (3D) application, and you don't normally run those? While locked up you should be able to ssh into it from another machine.
  • Thrashing. Does the hard drive light go on steadily when it locks up? Something is using too much RAM.
  • Other hardware problem. Run a memtest and/or another OS...
tumbleweed
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"my computer has lately started freezing completely when I run some programs"

What are those programs? The answer to your question is heavily depend on those "some programs" Anyway, check

/var/log/syslog

/var/log/kern.log Optionally you can use dmesg command to view kernel messages to check if something is wrong during boot process.

nobody
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