If anyone ever tells you he needs your root password, be extremely wary. You should normally never give out your root account, unless you are administering a machine with more than one system administrator.
The system will ask you to create an ordinary user account. This account should be your main personal login. You should _not_ use the root account for daily use or as your personal login.
Why not? It’s a lot harder to do damage to the system as an ordinary user than as root; system files are protected. Another reason is that you might be tricked into running a _Trojan horse_ program—that is, a program that takes advantage of your superuser powers to compromise the security of your system behind your back. Any good book on Unix system administration will cover this topic in more detail. Consider reading one if this topic is new to you.
Name the user account anything you like. If your name is John Smith, you might use “smith,” “john,” “jsmith,” or “js.”
Next, the system will ask whether you want to enable shadow passwords. This is an authentication system that makes your Linux system a bit more secure. Therefore, we recommend that you enable shadow passwords. Reconfiguration of the shadow password system can also be done later with the shadowconfig program.
If you have no use for PCMCIA, you can choose to remove it at this point. This will make your startup cleaner; also, it will make it easier to replace your kernel (PCMCIA requires a lot of correlation between the version of the PCMCIA drivers, the kernel modules, and the kernel itself). In general, you will not need PCMCIA unless you’re using a laptop.
The system will now ask you if you want to use the pre-rolled software configurations offered by Debian. You can always choose package-by-package what you want to install on your new machine. This is the purpose of the dselect program, described below. But this can be a long task with the thousands of packages available in Debian!
So, you have the ability to choose _tasks_ or _profiles_ instead. A _task_ is work you will do with the machine, such as “Perl programming” or “HTML authoring” or “Chinese word processing.” You can choose several tasks. A _profile_ is a category your machine will be a member of, such as “Network server” or “Personal workstation.” Unlike with tasks, you can choose only one profile.