On 18 July 2013 16:51, Eric Smith <brouhaha@fedoraproject.org> wrote:


Maybe your question is poorly stated, then.

What I thought you asked was how to read Linux log files from a
Windows installation, e.g., when Linux fails to boot.

This is indeed the question - so given you understood it so it seems I would say that it was not poorly stated.
 
 In the past I've been able to do that using ext2fsd without much difficulty.

This will not work depending on ext4 options, if LVM is in use or if BTRFS is used which is of course now supported as an option in the installer.

 
I used that method when I wasn't able to boot a rescue or live CD,

Then you were not using it with a default installed Fedora anyway which has a default of LVM in place

 
and the last resort would have been to pull the hard drive from the
machine and use a different computer to inspect it.  

That or live media is the best option in general... I know above you said you couldn't use a live CD and I'm quite curious as to why.

 
But if /var/log/messages is not made available by default, then using ext2fsd
won't work, and other methods become more difficult also.


It already won't work for a default installed Fedora ... there is no difference.

 
My main complaint is that removing the default syslog to
/var/log/messages makes it harder for me to diagnose broken machines
that OTHER people have set up, because those other people aren't going
to have installed a non-default syslog daemon.  Certainly if it's a
machine I'm installing, I'll know to install syslog.

Well fortunately you pay attention to these lists so you know to look at the README and if /var/log/messages is not there (or if Fedora in general now) you should use journalctl instead...