2. File Basics to enter your password. Like the graphic mode login, the console login will not echo the characters you are typing on the screen, but there will be no stars either. Note that you can log in several times with the same account on additional consoles and under X. Each session you open is independent of the others, and it is even possible to open several X sessions at the same time (although this is not recommended since it consumes a lot of resources). By default, Mandriva Linux has six virtual consoles in addition to the one reserved for the graphical interface. You can switch to any of them by pressing the Ctrl Alt F key sequence, where is — the number of the console that you want to switch to. By default, the graphical interface is on console number 7. Therefore, to switch to the second console, you would press the Ctrl , Alt and F2 keys. During the installation, DrakX also prompted you for the password of a very special user: root. This is the system administrator who will most likely be yourself. For your system’s security, it is very important for the root account to be always protected by a good and hard-to-guess password! If you regularly log in as root, it can be very easy to make a mistake which could render your system unusable: one single mistake can do it. In particular, if you did not set a password for the root account, then any user can alter any part of your system (and even other operating systems on your machine!). Obviously this is not a good idea. It is worth mentioning that internally, the system does not identify you by your login name. Instead, it uses a unique number assigned to the name: the User ID (UID) . Similarly every group is identified by its Group ID (GID) and not by its name. 2. File Basics Compared to Windows and most other operating systems, files are handled very differently under GNU/Linux. In this section we will cover the most obvious differences. For more information, please read Chapter 30, The Linux File System [407]. The major differences result directly from the fact that Linux is a multiuser system: every file is the exclusive property of one user and one group. One thing we didn’t mention about users is that every one of them possesses a personal directory (called the home directory). The user is the owner of this directory and all files created in it. Also note that these have an associated group as well and it is the primary group that the user belongs to. As it was mentioned before (see Section 1, Users and Groups [381]), a user may be in more than one group at the same time. However, this would not be very useful if that were the only notion of file ownership. As the file owner, a user may set permissions on files. These permissions dis
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