Booting Into Your New &debian; System
The Moment of Truth
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
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 &arch-kernel;, 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.
&mount-encrypted.xml;
Log In
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 browsable 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/
$ w3m .
The dot after the w3m command tells it to show the
contents of the current directory.
If you have a graphical desktop environment installed, you can also use
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.