How do you check logs in Guix?

Guix
1

Is there something similar to journalctl in Guix?

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2

These isn’t a journalctl equivalent in Guix AFAIK. But system logs lives in /var/log which you can view with any text editor or any of the tools from coreutils. E.g. view the last entries of a log sudo tail /var/log/some.log where some.log is the log you want to view.

Which works quite well when I need to review the logs. Only thing I miss from journalctl is the journalctl -b 0 -p err to view any errors during boot. Now you need to grep for them in dmesg or /var/log/messages

User logs usually lives in ~/.local/var/log.

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3

Ah, ok. Got it. How do you know which file is some.log? Are apps more or less good about naming their log file something sane? Or do you just grep everything in /var/log?

For example, I did a guix install obsidian and the install went fine. But when I try to launch the program from the desktop app launcher, nothing happens. I’m guessing it’s crashing on startup. But… uhh… where would I check the logs for that?

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There should be a console output for error with the log file name. Normally, you should see something contains obsidian or install in the file name.

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First thing I do is open it from a terminal and see, if it prints any errors.
Next would be a strace to find out if files are missing or not accessible and if it writes to any logs, you would see this in the output.

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So I’ve discovered that:

  • obsidian in the terminal points to /gnu/store/...obsidian-1.8.7/bin/obsidian
  • The desktop entry uses /gnu/store/...obsidian-1.8.7/obsidian

If I run the desktop entry command, obsidian, I get this:

$ /gnu/store/h88gfrafb0qs5jfhmbsqf5p2k1ydkb2s-obsidian-1.8.7/obsidian
/gnu/store/h88gfrafb0qs5jfhmbsqf5p2k1ydkb2s-obsidian-1.8.7/obsidian: error while loading shared libraries: libffmpeg.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

If I run bin/obsidian it launches correctly. (So is there a bug in the desktop entry file?)

It would be nice to know where the launch failure gets logged. I tried running strace as was suggested. I discovered Obsidian keeps a log here.

$ strace obsidian |& grep -i log
openat(AT_FDCWD, "/home/me/.config/obsidian/obsidian.log", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_APPEND|O_CLOEXEC, 0666) = 35

But seeing as how the obsidian binary isn’t even starting, there are no useful logs at that location.

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7

This can only be logged by the component executing the command from the desktop entry - probably the launcher of your DE.