We had another informative meeting on Thursday, March 5th, 6:30 PM, with 7 in attendance. Clint led off the evening with a few short announcements about the recent release of SystemRescueCD 1.1.6 and Parted Magic 1.7 which can both be used for backing up and rescueing systems now. Ed brought in a ClarkConnect server he was trying to get a SATA drive recognized but it was concluded that sata support was missing in its version of Linux kernel. Mike Brown talked about how to use those logs that get generated as one topic of discussion. This is his handout that was given to those present: Trouble Shooting Linux Log Files: General logs: /var/log -directory. Login Log: Ubuntu : /var/log/auth.log Fedora : /var/log/secure openSUSU : /var/log/messages General Log File for most Linux: /var/log/messages GUI: Ubuntu: System, Administration, and System Log Fedora: Applications, System Tools, and System Log openSUSE: YaST>Miscellaneous>System Log Help make heads or tails of the information in the log files? The obvious answer might be to simply turn to Google it. kernel ring buffer: 16k circular buffer, kernel events - to read launch a command prompt and type dmesg or (Dmesg) Commands: tail /var/log/messages - last 10 lines tail –f /var/log/messages - keep looking at the end of a particular file and not close Running Processes: Every program that is currently executing in Linux is assigned a PID, or process ID GUI Ubuntu: System, Administration, and System Monitor and then click the Processes tab Fedora: Applications, System Tools, and System Monitor openSUSE: in GNOME, Computer, More Applications, System, and GNOME System Monitor openSUSE: in KDE, SUSE icon, Applications, System, Monitor, Performance Monitor, Process Table tab. Initially, System Monitor will only show you programs that you own. To see all the processes running on the system, highlight a process and click View and All Processes From The Command Line: ps –eaf kill PID kill -KILL PID Our next meeting will be April 2nd, in the Boise Public Library's Computer Lab at 6:30. We hope to have Ken McDonnell as our presenter and will be discussing his book along with the usual Linux discussions of interest.