Your system's first boot on its own power is what electrical engineers call the smoke test. If you did a default installation, the first thing you should see when you boot the system is the menu of the grub or possibly the lilo bootloader. The first choices in the menu will be for your new Debian system. If you had any other operating systems on your computer (like Windows) that were detected by the installation system, those will be listed lower down in the menu. If the system fails to start up correctly, don't panic. If the installation was successful, chances are good that there is only a relatively minor problem that is preventing the system from booting Debian. In most cases such problems can be fixed without having to repeat the installation. One available option to fix boot problems is to use the installer's built-in rescue mode (see ). If you are new to Debian and Linux, you may need some help from more experienced users. For direct on-line help you can try the IRC channels #debian or #debian-boot on the OFTC network. Alternatively you can contact the debian-user mailing list. For less common architectures like &arch-title;, your best option is to ask on the debian-&arch-listname; mailing list. You can also file an installation report as described in . Please make sure that you describe your problem clearly and include any messages that are displayed and may help others to diagnose the issue. If you had any other operating systems on your computer that were not detected or not detected correctly, please file an installation report. If you have just performed a diskless install on a BVM or Motorola VMEbus machine: once the system has loaded the tftplilo program from the TFTP server, from the LILO Boot: prompt enter one of: b6000 followed by &enterkey; to boot a BVME 4000/6000 b162 followed by &enterkey; to boot an MVME162 b167 followed by &enterkey; to boot an MVME166/167 Go to the directory containing the installation files and start up the Penguin booter, holding down the command key. Go to the Settings dialogue ( command T ), and locate the kernel options line which should look like root=/dev/ram video=font:VGA8x16 or similar. You need to change the entry to root=/dev/yyyy. Replace the yyyy with the Linux name of the partition onto which you installed the system (e.g. /dev/sda1); you wrote this down earlier. The video=font:VGA8x8 is recommended especially for users with tiny screens. The kernel would pick a prettier (6x11) font but the console driver for this font can hang the machine, so using 8x16 or 8x8 is safer at this stage. You can change this at any time. If you don't want to start GNU/Linux immediately each time you start, uncheck the Auto Boot option. Save your settings in the Prefs file using the Save Settings As Default option. Now select Boot Now ( command B ) to start your freshly installed GNU/Linux instead of the RAMdisk installer system. Debian should boot, and you should see the same messages as when you first booted the installation system, followed by some new messages. If the machine fails to boot after completing the installation, and stops with a boot: prompt, try typing Linux followed by &enterkey;. (The default boot configuration in quik.conf is labeled Linux). The labels defined in quik.conf will be displayed if you press the Tab key at the boot: prompt. You can also try booting back into the installer, and editing the /target/etc/quik.conf placed there by the Install Quik on a Hard Disk step. Clues for dealing with quik are available at . To boot back into MacOS without resetting the nvram, type bye at the OpenFirmware prompt (assuming MacOS has not been removed from the machine). To obtain an OpenFirmware prompt, hold down the command option o f keys while cold booting the machine. If you need to reset the OpenFirmware nvram changes to the MacOS default in order to boot back to MacOS, hold down the command option p r keys while cold booting the machine. If you use BootX to boot into the installed system, just select your desired kernel in the Linux Kernels folder, un-choose the ramdisk option, and add a root device corresponding to your installation; e.g. /dev/hda8. On G4 machines and iBooks, you can hold down the option key and get a graphical screen with a button for each bootable OS, &debian; will be a button with a small penguin icon. If you kept MacOS and at some point it changes the OpenFirmware boot-device variable you should reset OpenFirmware to its default configuration. To do this hold down the command option p r keys while cold booting the machine. The labels defined in yaboot.conf will be displayed if you press the Tab key at the boot: prompt. Resetting OpenFirmware on G3 or G4 hardware will cause it to boot &debian; by default (if you correctly partitioned and placed the Apple_Bootstrap partition first). If you have &debian; on a SCSI disk and MacOS on an IDE disk this may not work and you will have to enter OpenFirmware and set the boot-device variable, ybin normally does this automatically. After you boot &debian; for the first time you can add any additional options you desire (such as dual boot options) to /etc/yaboot.conf and run ybin to update your boot partition with the changed configuration. Please read the yaboot HOWTO for more information. &mount-encrypted.xml; Once your system boots, you'll be presented with the login prompt. Log in using the personal login and password you selected during the installation process. Your system is now ready for use. If you are a new user, you may want to explore the documentation which is already installed on your system as you start to use it. There are currently several documentation systems, work is proceeding on integrating the different types of documentation. Here are a few starting points. Documentation accompanying programs you have installed can be found in /usr/share/doc/, under a subdirectory named after the program (or, more precise, the Debian package that contains the program). However, more extensive documentation is often packaged separately in special documentation packages that are mostly not installed by default. For example, documentation about the package management tool apt can be found in the packages apt-doc or apt-howto. In addition, there are some special folders within the /usr/share/doc/ hierarchy. Linux HOWTOs are installed in .gz (compressed) format, in /usr/share/doc/HOWTO/en-txt/. After installing dhelp, you will find a browse-able index of documentation in /usr/share/doc/HTML/index.html. One easy way to view these documents using a text based browser is to enter the following commands: $ cd /usr/share/doc/ $ w3c . The dot after the w3c command tells it to show the contents of the current directory. If you have a graphical desktop environment installed, you can also its web browser. Start the web browser from the application menu and enter /usr/share/doc/ in the address bar. You can also type info command or man command to see documentation on most commands available at the command prompt. Typing help will display help on shell commands. And typing a command followed by --help will usually display a short summary of the command's usage. If a command's results scroll past the top of the screen, type | more after the command to cause the results to pause before scrolling past the top of the screen. To see a list of all commands available which begin with a certain letter, type the letter and then two tabs.