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?

  • kumi@feddit.onlineEnglish
    5·
    6 hours ago

    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.err

    Maybe 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 -1

    That might turn up some clues on where to look.

    If you have to dig deeper, look into strace (premium subscribers only).

    • kumi@feddit.onlineEnglish
      1·
      3 hours ago

      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

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    7 hours ago

    It’s pretty hard to totally “crash” a running Linux kernel, so understanding some details about what symptoms happened, during, and after (screen freezes, sound stops, mouse stops…etc) would be helpful to discern if this was a kernel thing, or just apps crashing. Almost always ends up being a hardware issue or resource constraint though.

    As for game logs and crashing, here are some guides and info:

    https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3287870137 (This shows some debug steps in detail) https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/6650 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=285102

    • kajees@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
      1·
      5 hours ago

      That’s a fair point.

      Both system crashes were in fact a totally unresponsive system after a random action minutes after coming back from a long period of inactivity.

      Crash 1: computer had been left on, downloading some software and games, for the past 2 hours. When I came back, I moved the mouse, the screen turned on again, I put down my password, saw the files that had finished downloading, and then I pressed alt tab, and the whole screen froze. After waiting 1 minute, I tried closing programs or seeing if anything was responsive, and it was not the case. No keyboard command was working, mouse wasn’t moving. I did a hard reset.

      Crash 2: I’m playing something full screen, then pause to go have lunch. Come back 1 hour later, pc never went into sleep, and the screen is still on, on the pause menu. I alt tab to check my email, and when I tab back into the game the screen freezes on my email (with the tab selector in the middle).