How to determine the cause of a crash? Anything like syslog, dmesg in var/log/?

[Anna]

My Pinephone crashes about five to ten times a day without any obvious cause. (Is that normal, by the way?)

In var/log/ are none of the log files (like syslog or dmesg) usually recommended as a source of information when experiencing crashes.

Are there any other files (maybe in some other directory) that I could check in order to determine the number and causes of crashes?

[mark1250]

Use journalctl as root to see the logs.

[Anna]

Use journalctl as root to see the logs.

Thank you! That not only answered my question but also gave me a great search word to find further information.

[zborgerd]

Mine also crashes and freezes when nothing is going on except the phone sitting idle and attached to the dock. Haven't yet identified the cause.

[Anna]

i gave encrypted mobian another try, after the new alpha5 installer came out.. and still not usable for me, slow and hangs, plus the phone gets hot while only reading data (like kiwix offline wikipedia).. i think many performance issues/crashes come from FDE being too much to handle.. if you use it only to make calls this might not be a problem though

In order to rule out that the instability was caused by my messing and experimenting with the Pinephone, I installed a fresh, unencrypted version of Mobian on the SD card (well, I used Megi's multiboot image, which is four or five months old, and updated it).

Result: Only two crashes in two days. (Installing the indispensable Axolotl, which is the only change I dared to make so far, does not seem to have affected the stability negatively.)

That is a level I can happily live with [knocking on wood].