# 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 rescue).

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 submit-bug. 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.

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## 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.