guisoftware-recommendationsyslog
does anybody know a good graphical logfile analyzer for (mainly) syslog messages from ubuntu?
maybe one that converts the text-based messages in objects to sort/group/filter messages
like windows' logfile viewer.
As alternative more comfortable terminal tools than combinations of grep/sed/cat/less are also appreciated (or a very good combination? 😛 )
Update:
As of Aug 2018, Shutter project hasn't had a release or security fix since 2014. Many key libraries are depreciated, it may not exist beyond Ubuntu 18.04. Consider a newer maintained alternative, such as one of the projects listed below. Know of something new and missing? Add it!
I am using Shutter 
.
If you don't find it, you can check the detailed installation instructions which will give you a PPA for it.
It's a really handy screen capture application with easy to use plug-ins to give a nice touch to your screenshot and as many other to easily share the files.
It offers in-house image editing and special effects (via plug-ins) to enhance the quality of your screenshot. You can access this options via the menu (1), or the toolbar (2).
The effects here are all done with Shutter (Plug-in Reflexion and Edit auto-increment shape).
And then to publish them, I just right click in Shutter and choose Export (3). Then I publish it via Ubuntu One. I go to the directory where I published the file, right click on it and select Copy Ubuntu One public URL.
Finally here when I comment, I click on img in the small tool bar and select From the web and paste the link that was copied in the previous step.
It's easy and fully integrated.
For those on 10.04, check that you have all shutter dependencies. As you might miss some of the plug-ins. For user on Ubuntu 10.10, this should be fixed.
As has been suggested in many other similar threads, Pencil offers you a nice framework for prototyping and wireframing (even web stuff). And it's free.
I realise you've already said this isn't the answer you're looking for (having been linked to my question on the topic) but my scope is web development... Which is what you say you want to do. It's perfect for fleshing out page-level objects in a quick grid layout. Much more simple than a full graphics package, with various UI hints available as drag-on objects.
There's a deb package available for installation.
Best Answer
There are various log viewers for the desktop environments; gnome-system-log is searchable and user-friendly; as is ksystemlog for KDE (although of course you then need to install the KDE runtime). The gnome log should be the best one for you really, as it can be used to quickly filter the logs and find what you want; you can go straight to syslog, for example, and find the Ubuntu system messages and monitor how the system is working in the background with cron, etc. I recommend log viewing (and then researching things) as a great way of learning how the system works.
Terminal wise, you can watch any open logs in real-time with
tail -f <log file>and grep can be very useful to search for words such as 'Machine' 'Hardware' and 'error', which often pop up in faults: for examplegrep -i 'machine' /var/log/kern.log. With grep it is important to use the i switch to ignore capitalisation, as you can miss important bits of the log without it. To look through a whole folder of logs, you can usegrep -ir <folder>.