Unless you specified a host name for your computer, or get that
information from a network, your Linux install 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 install, you
can log in using that name and password. If you didn't create a user
account when installing then you can log in as the
super user, also known as root. The root password is the system
password you assigned during install.
It is highly recommended that you create at least one user account during
install, or by using the user configuration tool or the
useradd command afterwards. This is for security
reasons. A normal user doesn't have the permissions that root has, so
working in a user account can help prevent system corruption.
You should only log in as root when you are doing system
maintainence, or other tasks, that only root can do.
When you are logged in as a normal user, and find that you need root
permissions to do something (like mounting filesystems, activating
ethernet or ppp connections, etc.) you should open a terminal
window in X and issue the following command:
su -
If you are not in X, and are in a console (text screen with a command
prompt) then just type su -.
That command will give you access to root, and the full root path, so you
can run any commands you want to.
Once you are root, you can type startx to start the GUI interface (if
you have it installed) and work from there.
