Logging In as a Normal User

In this chapter we will explore a UML instance in more detail, looking at how it is similar to and how it differs from a physical Linux machine. While doing a set of fairly simple, standard system administration chores in the instance, we will see some UML twists to them. For example, we will add swap space and mount filesystems. The twist is that we will do these things by plugging the required devices into the UML at runtime, from the host, without rebooting the UML.

First, let's log in to the UML instance, as we did in the previous chapter. When the UML boots, we see a login prompt in the window in which we started it. Some xterm windows pop up on the screen, which we ignore. They also contain login prompts. We could log in as root, but let's log in as a normal user, username user, with the very secure password user:

Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 usermode tty1 usermode login: user Password: Last login: Sun Dec 22 21:50:44 2002 from uml on pts/0 Linux usermode 2.6.11-rc3-mm1 #2 Tue Feb 8 15:41:40 EST 2005 \ i686 unknown UML%  pwd /home/user

This is basically the same as a physical system. In this window, we are a normal, unprivileged user, in a normal home directory. We can test our lack of privileges by trying to do something nasty:

UML% rm -f /bin/ls rm: cannot unlink `/bin/ls': Permission denied