Reading system logs to determine whats crashing?

BopNiblets

Hullo there!
I have Mint 6 based on Intrepid Ibex so it has some extra stuff like PulseAudio and AWN which I set up, but it's crashed a few times, the disk starts clicking away and the gui becomes unresponsive, all the windows grey out and the mouse only moves every 15 seconds, and the audio stutters and stops.

Is there any way of finding out what's causing it from the System Log? There's a few dodgy looking entries in the different logs around the time of the crash.

Here's some from syslog and userlog:

Dec 24 15:48:08 eoghan-desktop pulseaudio[24162]: module-x11-xsmp.c: X11 session manager not running.
Dec 24 15:48:08 eoghan-desktop pulseaudio[24162]: module.c: Failed to load  module "module-x11-xsmp" (argument: ""): initialization failed.

Dec 24 15:47:57 eoghan-desktop x-session-manager[24071]: WARNING: Unable to find provider 'gnome-wm' of required component 'windowmanager' 
Dec 24 15:48:08 eoghan-desktop x-session-manager[24071]: WARNING: Application 'gnome-wm.desktop' failed to register before timeout 
Dec 24 15:48:08 eoghan-desktop pulseaudio[24162]: module-x11-xsmp.c: X11 session manager not running.
Dec 24 15:48:08 eoghan-desktop pulseaudio[24162]: module.c: Failed to load  module "module-x11-xsmp" (argument: ""): initialization failed.

Would running the program from the terminal help?

You then get the complete log of what it is doing / what it wants to do but can't etc..

BopNiblets

Well, which program?! I don't know if it's audio or gnome or something else!

run your audio programs from the terminal, you will see pretty quickly if there is an error.

Orion

I had a similar problem on Ibex. Turning off Visual Effects sorted it out.