I'm wondering if Chainsaw is too old for Eclipse? The java project i'm working on is using JDK 1.5 .
Does it need to be compatible with Eclipse? because I did find another log -viewer called LogViewer.
Chainsaw V2 is a standalone app that can be used with JDK 1.5 just fine - if you mean using a socketappender, assuming the version of log4j you are sending with matches the version Chainsaw uses (log4j 1.2.x).
If you don't want to use a socketappender, you can use a fileappender - it's much easier - in the Chainsaw config screen, point it to your log4j.properties or log4j.xml containing a fileappender, and it will build the correct configuration to tail your log file.
The Chainsaw V2 available from the website is really old - the latest Chainsaw V2 developer snapshot is available here: http://people.apache.org/~sdeboy