.xsession-errors

[kpep01]

I've had a bit of a problem (I believe it actually started after emerging OpenOffice, but, I can't verify that) with my box freezing up for several minutes at at time. No matter how much I searched my standard logs, I was unable to find any reference as to the source of the problem.

The other morning in happened again, so I began looking harder at my system, and ran into a little (presently 1,362,876Kb) file in my /Home dir called .xsession-errors. It jumped out at me, since the time of the last file change corresponded with the temporary and obnoxious freeze of my box. Danged, there is a lot of reading material to figure out in that file.

The first place I started looking was at the man pages for "X." Gosh, those man pages are far more geared towards hackers than I could possible understand. The "See Also" section alone made my eyes glaze over. (Twas a good thing I had to go to work, otherwise I would have become even more lost and confused.)

As a means of better maintaining and correlating these "freezing" events, I'd love to do a couple of things wth that .xsession-errors file.

First, I would prefer that this file be placed in a more centralized location - regardless of the user logged in (I can't get the family off of the windows box, so, I'm the only one on the Linux Box). .That centrailized location, to me, would be under /var/logs.

Second, the lack of date/time format in this error log is greatly annoying. It makes event correlation that much more difficult. So, I would like to add these lines to the config file for the error logs as well. Since the system is presently set to log the errors into a specific /home file (depending on the user of the moment), a line should also be added as to whom that user was at the moment of the error.

I've tried, through "locate" to find the appropriate file, but, X is so big. A non-hacker such as myself is hopelessly lost.

If someone would kindly give me a clue as to where to start my searching so that I might bring this error log into better control (yes, logrotate will heppen on this one until I figure out and clean up the problems), I'd be most appreciative.

Incidentally, the most verbose logging over the psst week has been the following line (which was the line that caused the freeze when I discovered the file):

[MEW]

At least on my system, the logging is setup by the script /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession (I use XDM). (Specifically, the critical line is 'exec > "$errfile" 2>&1', and errfile has been set to "$HOME/.xsession-errors".