If you really want to see what's happening beneath the hood of your Linux distribution, you need to use log files.

With tail, you can view a Linux log file as the system writes to it in real time. So while you’re trying to troubleshoot that system, you can follow the syslog, the auth.log, faillog, kern.log ...

Featured text from the download: HOW DO YOU VIEW THOSE LOG FILES? There are two main methods of viewing Linux log files from the command line. The first is static and the second is in real-time.