Lesson 1 - The First Boot

After a successful installation and reboot, you are first greeted by GRUB (a blue/black menu in which you can choose a distro to boot) and then, usually, by a login prompt. This screen is also called a TTY, and we are usually in TTY1 after a successful boot.

The default runlevel in LinuxBBQ, just for your information, is runlevel 2. We'll need it later, or never, depends on you.

Tip: You can switch between the TTYs by pressing Alt and the cursor keys left and right. {: .callout .info}

Anyway, make sure you are in TTY1.

Enter:

root

and then the password, which is not echoed:

root

As next, you want to change the root password to something more complex than just 4 letters.

Enter:

passwd

and then type your new password. You will have to repeat it again.

You want to create a user account. Your desired username is, for example, stanislaus:

adduser stanislaus

You will be asked a few questions. Answer at least those for the password, everything else can be skipped by pressing Enter a few times.

Now, you want to switch to the user account.

First, leave the login shell for root {: .callout .danger}

Enter:

exit

You see the login prompt again, but this time you enter your username, press Enter and then your password, followed by Enter.

If you are lucky, you will find yourself in the graphical environment, also called X. On the bottom you see a bar, with some numbers and the actual date and time. This is your window manager, WMII.

Press Alt + a and then Enter:

welcome

You can see a welcome message and some help about how to use wmii.

Read it, play around with it, make sure you understand the basic principles of the window manager, because in the next lessons you will always need one or more terminal windows open.

To turn off the computer, don't just press the red button. Open a terminal and type:

poweroff

Sometimes, the computer does not power off, it just leaves the graphical environment, prints a few messages on the screen, and then remains idle. This is usually due to ACPI. In this case, you can temporarily press the power button for a few seconds after the computer has tried to shut down. We'll fix this later.

You can put the computer to sleep, so that it does not power off. It is called suspend and activated through:

sudo pm-suspend

Have a try, suspend your box. In the worst of all cases, it doesn't do anything.

stark/Lesson 1 - The First Boot.md

Lesson 1 - The First Boot

Further readings in our wiki: