Newbie: Where are "console" messages written to? FC2 2.6.5

[Clive at Rational]

After a lot of pain and wasted days on Fedora 3 2.6.10
/ 2.6.11 and 5 (!) failures (machine hangs during
install) trying to install Fedora 4 - I have fallen
back to Fedora 2 2.6.5 (!!!!).

    This is a lot more stable than  any of the other
kernels / distributions. However, from time to time,
the machine's "console" (I don't sign on to it  I
access it using VNC4 and telnet) fills up with rapidly
flowing messages. The format seems to be (x"nnnnnnn"
text) and in a cycle of four different messages.
"Kernel panic" is a string that appears often in these
fast produced messages. There is no one obvious event
that causes this problem

   All I want is a stable , simple, Samba file store -
and I seem to spend my time rebooting. This is
frustrating and demoralising.

   Can someone tell me in which log file I find the
sequence of messages that spew out on the console - so
I can at least post the error? I have searched
directory var/log for the string "kernel panic" - and
there is nothing.

Thanks

Clive