Your first start and your Linux user

Starting#

Click Start in the instance's header. The dot turns yellow, then green. A first start takes a little longer than later ones; after that, starts are quick and resuming a suspended instance is nearly instant.

You don't always need Start: opening the Terminal tab, clicking Find Apps, or opening a Linux app all start the instance for you.

Your Linux user#

The first time a distro starts, MSL asks you to create your everyday Linux account — a username and a password, just like setting up a fresh Linux install. It's an administrator account: it joins the distro's admin group, and sudo asks for its password.

In the app#

Clicking Start, Find Apps or opening a Linux app on a distro that has no account yet brings up Create your Linux account first:

1. Username — it's filled in with your Mac's short name if that works on Linux. Change it if you like; it doesn't need to match.
2. Password, and Retype password.
3. Create Account. MSL starts the instance, creates the account, and then carries on with whatever you were doing. A banner confirms it.

Cancel leaves the distro without an account; you'll be asked again next time.

In a terminal#

The first interactive shell — the Terminal tab, Terminal.app, or msl work — asks in the terminal itself, with a small ASCII kitty:

Welcome to MSL - debian!
Please create a default UNIX user account. The username does not need
to match your Mac username. It becomes your login for debian from now
on, and its password is the one sudo asks for.
(root is always available from the Mac: msl <instance> -u root)

New UNIX username:

Type a username, then a password twice. Nothing appears while you type the password — that's normal.

The rules#

• A username starts with a lowercase letter or an underscore, and uses only lowercase letters, digits, _ or - — at most 32 characters.
• Names the system already uses (root, nobody, the built-in msl account, and so on) are refused, and so is a name that already exists in that distro.

From then on, every shell on that distro — in the app, in Terminal.app, from the msl command, over SSH — logs you in as that user.

More on users, root and sudo: Linux users and root.

The greeting#

Every interactive shell opens with a short banner — msl@debian in colour — and a dimmed one-line greeting under it, never the same one twice in a row. Some are sweet, some are cursed, one is extremely tsundere about your uptime. None of them are emoji; MSL speaks kaomoji. (≧▽≦)