this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Yeah there are a lot although I would still consider myself a beginner at Linux and the terminal so I'm not really sure what the logs mean and which ones specifically I should be looking for.
unless you're using a very old or niche distribution, all of your logs are centralized in to a single space and the command
journalctl
will let you look at them.in your situation i would use the command
journalctl -f
to get a live action printout of all the things that are happening as you try to start your x server and you can look through them to find messages in the logs that contain something like "failure" or "error" or "timeout" to find clues as to what's causing your problem.you don't need the xserver to run linux and most distributions give you 7 virtual terminals that you can log into without the xserver and each one can be accessed using the keyboard combinations alt+crtl+f1 through alt+crtl+f7.
when i used to be in situations like yours i would log into two virtual terminals. i would use one of them to run
tail -f $logname
and the other to start the xserver.tail -f $logname
is the older deprecated version ofjournalctl -f
and they both show you what's happening in your computer as it occurs. you'll likely only need to see it once or twice to get a sense of what's happening and what the interval looks like and you can accomplish something similar if you keep track of your own timestamps by hand and then look through the logs searching for those timestamps in the logs.share the log messages with errors/failures/timeout/whatever in them and we can both look for clues using google or ai.