So you've booted, and you're looking at something that looks like this:
Welcome to Linux 2.2.14
darkstar login: |
Hmm.. nobody said anything about a login. And what's a darkstar? Don't worry;
you probably didn't accidentally fire up a hyperspace comm-link to the Empire's
artificial moon. (I'm afraid the hyperspace comm-link protocol isn't currently
supported by the Linux kernel.) No, darkstar is just the name of one of our
computers, and its name gets stamped on as the default. If you specified a
name for your computer during setup, you should see it instead of darkstar.
As for the login... If this is your first time, you'll want to log in as
root. You'll be prompted for a password; if you set
one during the setup process, that's what it's looking for. If not, just hit
enter. That's it-- you're in!
Okay, who or what is “root”? And what's
it doing with an account on your system?
Well, in the world of Unix and
similar operating systems (like Linux), there are users and then there are
users. We'll go into this in more detail later, but the important thing to
know now is that root is the user above all users; root is all-powerful and
all-knowing, and nobody disobeys root. It just isn't
allowed. Root is what we call a “superuser”, and rightly so.
And best of all, root is you.
Cool, huh?
If you're not sure: yes, that's very cool. The catch is, though, that root is
inherently allowed to break anything it so desires. You might want to skip
ahead to Chapter 12 and see about adding a user; then
login as that user and work from there. The traditional wisdom is that it's
best to only become superuser when absolutely necessary, so as to minimize the
possibility of accidentally breaking something.
By the way, if you decide you want to be root while you're logged in as
someone else, no problems. Just use the su(1) command.
You'll be asked for root's password and then it will make you root until
you exit or logout. You can also become
any other user using su, provided you know that user's
password: su logan, for instance, would make you me.