How to set up debugging?

[John Huttley <john mwk co nz>]

I got gnome + e going just now.

Naturally I know nothing about how it works or what it does.
Consequently I was just blundering around at random.
Anyway, with a slip of the mouse I seemed to have dropped the file
manager from the gnome panel on to the bottom bar.
There was a popup menu displaying on it. The mouse worked but everything
was dead.

I killed X and saw that there had been a gdb dump to the virtual
console, most of which has scrolled off.

I'm, sure that this kind of info would be useful.

So the question is, How do I set my system to record this kind of
debugging trace??

Regards

John