2.1.1. Introduction

In order to work on a Linux system directly, you will need to provide a user name and password. You always need to authenticate to the system. As we already mentioned in the exercise from Chapter 1, most PC-based Linux systems have two basic modes for a system to run in: either quick and sober in text console mode, which looks like DOS with mouse, multitasking and multi-user features, or in graphical mode, which looks better but eats more system resources.