Recently my system has been acting weird. I consider it stable and I leave my system pretty much running 24/7. However, just about an hour ago I decided to get out of the PC for a bit and do my things, when I come back I noticed that the PC somehow rebooted to the login screen and some of the things I had running somehow got corrupted.
Things that got corrupted:
KDE configurations: lost my wallpaper settings and folder widgets I had set. I'm glad it was only this since it's pretty trivial.
Anyway, I want to become more... efficient in analyzing and resolving these issues if I can. What are the recommended steps to verify these issues?
What I did at least today was read the syslog and kernel logs but nothing gave me any indication that there was anything wrong to cause a crash or force it to reboot.
2 Answers
First 2 basic Steps are:
- Read the syslog and dmesg (/var/log/syslog* and /var/log/dmesg*) and check for errors right before the last boot. In dmesg the boot is at [0.000000], so you want right before that.
- Memtest! Your RAM may have gone byebye.
It depends on where the problem is. If you're loosing you KDE wallpapers for example, system logs will be irrelevant, instead you should check ~/.xsession-errors and /var/log/xorg.0.log where progrms about GUI programs are listed.
Running dmesg (or /var/log/dmesg which is the same thing) will often give useful information but it is very unlikely to contain any information about this type of thing.
KDE probably has it's own logs as well but I don't use it so I'm not sure. They might be under /var/log but more likely are .dotfiles somewhere in your $HOME.
Different problems end up in different log files, the only general advice is "check the log files".
