Running Mac OS X Tiger

Logging In

When the system has booted and starts the loginwindow program, the system displays the user login screen, as shown in Figure 5-3. You won’t see the login screen, however, if you’ve enabled the auto-login preference in the Accounts preference panel. With auto-login turned on, the selected user is automatically logged into her user account as the system starts up.

When you log in, the following things happen:

• Your environment, including preferences, environment variables, and Keychains, are loaded.

• The SystemUIServer is launched and handles the menu bar and menu extras (those little applets up in the upper-right area of the screen).

• The pasteboard server (pbs) is launched.

• The mouse, keyboard, sound, and display are configured according to your preferences.

• Any user-defined login items are processed.

• The Dock and Finder are started.

Figure 5-3. The Login panel

Bypassing the GUI Login Window

If for some reason you are at the login window and want to bypass it and get straight to the command line, there’s a quick and easy way to do so. Simply enter >console (include the greater-than symbol) as your username in the login dialog box. The GUI exits and dumps you off at the black and white text-based console. Don’t worry, the GUI comes back after you log out of your console session.

The only catch to this trick is that you must have your login screen set to display the username and password ...