Your system's first boot on its own power is what electrical engineers call the smoke test. If you are booting directly into Debian, and the system doesn't start up, either use your original installation boot media, or insert the custom boot floppy if you have one, and reset your system. This way, you will probably need to add some boot arguments like root=root, where root is your root partition, such as /dev/sda1. Alternatively, see for instructions on using the installer's built-in rescue mode. 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. If you created encrypted volumes during the installation and assigned them mount points, you will be asked to enter the passphrase for each of these volumes during the boot. The actual procedure differs slightly between dm-crypt and loop-AES. For partitions encrypted using dm-crypt you will be shown the following prompt during the boot: Starting early crypto disks... cryptX(starting) Enter LUKS passphrase: In the first line of the prompt, X is the number of the loop device. You are now probably wondering for which volume you are actually entering the passphrase. Does it relate to your /home? Or to /var? Of course, if you have just one encrypted volume, this is easy and you can just enter the passphrase you used when setting up this volume. If you set up more than one encrypted volume during the installation, the notes you wrote down as the last step in come in handy. If you did not make a note of the mapping between cryptX and the mount points before, you can still find it in /etc/crypttab and /etc/fstab of your new system. The prompt may look somewhat different when an encrypted root file system is mounted. This depends on which initramfs generator was used to generate the initrd used to boot the system. The example below is for an initrd generated using initramfs-tools: Begin: Mounting root file system... ... Begin: Running /scripts/local-top ... Enter LUKS passphrase: No characters (even asterisks) will be shown while entering the passphrase. If you enter the wrong passphrase, you have two more tries to correct it. After the third try the boot process will skip this volume and continue to mount the next filesystem. Please see for further information. After entering all passphrases the boot should continue as usual. For partitions encrypted using loop-AES you will be shown the following prompt during the boot: Checking loop-encrypted file systems. Setting up /dev/loopX (/mountpoint) Password: No characters (even asterisks) will be shown while entering the passphrase. If you enter the wrong passphrase, you have two more tries to correct it. After the third try the boot process will skip this volume and continue to mount the next filesystem. Please see for further information. After entering all passphrases the boot should continue as usual. If some of the encrypted volumes could not be mounted because a wrong passphrase was entered, you will have to mount them manually after the boot. There are several cases. The first case concerns the root partition. When it is not mounted correctly, the boot process will halt and you will have to reboot the computer to try again. The easiest case is for encrypted volumes holding data like /home or /srv. You can simply mount them manually after the boot. For loop-AES this is one-step operation: # mount /mount_point Password: where /mount_point should be replaced by the particular directory (e.g. /home). The only difference from an ordinary mount is that you will be asked to enter the passphrase for this volume. For dm-crypt this is a bit trickier. First you need to register the volumes with device mapper by running: # /etc/init.d/cryptdisks start This will scan all volumes mentioned in /etc/crypttab and will create appropriate devices under the /dev directory after entering the correct passphrases. (Already registered volumes will be skipped, so you can repeat this command several times without worrying.) After successful registration you can simply mount the volumes the usual way: # mount /mount_point If any volume holding noncritical system files could not be mounted (/usr or /var), the system should still boot and you should be able to mount the volumes manually like in the previous case. However, you will also need to (re)start any services usually running in your default runlevel because it is very likely that they were not started. The easiest way to achieve this is by switching to the first runlevel and back by entering # init 1 at the shell prompt and pressing Control D when asked for the root password. 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 to 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 is in /usr/share/doc/, under a subdirectory named after the program. For example, the APT User's Guide for using apt to install other programs on your system, is located in /usr/share/doc/apt/guide.html/index.html. In addition, there are some special folders within the /usr/share/doc/ hierarchy. Linux HOWTOs are installed in .gz 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 is to cd /usr/share/doc/, and type lynx followed by a space and a dot (the dot stands for the current directory). 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. For a more complete introduction to Debian and GNU/Linux, see /usr/share/doc/debian-guide/html/noframes/index.html.