My laptop running ubuntu 9.10 hung and I've been searching the net for a while but I could still use some help (ubuntu/linux is still new to me).

I am mostly concerned with "how" to troubleshoot a hang and/or crash in Ubuntu: where to look, debug/log file locations, etc. I tried searching files in the /var/log folder but found nothing related to problem (as far as I can tell).

I would really appreciate is somebody could just point me in the right direction and let me know where I should start troubleshooting, what I should initially be looking for etc.