This chapter answers some of the most common questions about using Red Hat Linux that you may ask as you become more familiar with it. From recovering forgotten passwords to troubleshooting package installation problems, this chapter will ease you step-by-step through some common tasks and get you on your way.
I have installed Red Hat Linux. After rebooting, I get a message telling me it needs a localhost login and password. What are these?
Unless you specified a host name for your computer, or received that information from a network, your Red Hat Linux installation will call your machine localhost.localdomain by default.
When you get to that initial prompt, it is asking you to log in to your system. If you created a user account during installation, you can log in using that user name and password. If you didn't create a user account during installation, then you can log in as the super user, also known as root. The root password is the system password you assigned during installation.
It is highly recommended that you create at least one user account during installation. If you did not, you can create a new user after logging in as root with the Red Hat User Manager GUI application or the useradd command-line utility. For more information, refer to the Section called Creating a User Account in Chapter 1.