Type in your username and press Enter. You are then asked for the password. If everything is correct the GNOME desktop will come up. You are now logged in. There are a few things to note about the screen that appears:
You have two panels, one at the top and another at the bottom. Various properties of the bottom panel may be changed by using the right mouse button and chosing among the submenues.
At the top, to the left you find three menus: Applications, Places, and Desktop. To access any of the items, click the left mouse button, move the mouse and click again.
Clicking on the house symbol starts the nautilus file manager for your home directory.
Clicking on the terminal symbol starts a gnome-terminal with a shell. Try that now! A shell is a command-interpreter that runs in a terminal (or terminal emulator). The traditional way of using a UNIX system is to give commands to a shell . You can now start and type commands into the window. Some aspects of the shell are discussed in Chapter 4.
To the right in the bottom panel is a miniature view of the four different Workspaces (or desktops) that by default are available. You change Workspace by clicking in the "Workspace Switcher" to the right in the lower panel or by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Left or Ctrl-Alt-Right.
Unix has a long history dating back to September 1969. The interested should take a look at the Unix timeline at Unix History. The today so common GNU/Linux systems (which are available in a large number of distributions) are made up of a large number of GNU programs together with the Linux kernel.
Changing the password is done with passwd. Type passwd in the xterm; you will be prompted for old and new password.
Start Mozilla firefox from the top panel: Applications - Internet - Mozilla Firefox or from the shell, $ firefox
The complete instructions are available at http://www.tp.umu.se/ModSim/linux-guide/. This location is also linked from the schedule page.
When using the online documentation it is handy to be able to copy directly from the browser to the xterm or to the editor. To do that: place the cursor with the left mouse button, move the mouse with the left button pressed down, and release the button at the end of the region. The selected region is then colored differently from other text. To copy that region, position the mouse at the point for insertion and press the middle mouse button.