In addition to being useful for adding drives, GParted can also assist you in
recovering from problems. You can run it after booting Ubuntu in a live
session or running from a live CD or a USB drive. In this case, the system’s
hard drives are not mounted, and you can manage them from the live
session.
After you have made your partitioning selections, installation continues by
asking about your current location; it helps you select the most appropriate
keyboard layout for your system, based on that location and the most common
language used there, and it asks you to enter your name, a username that you
will use to log in to the system, and a password. You can even choose to
encrypt your /home folder during the process.
A QUICK ASIDE ON PASSWORDS
When you create your password, be sure to remember what you entered. If
you forget it, you cannot use your new system because you will not be able
to log on to it.
When setting a password, the common advice is to make sure it has a
mixture of letters and numbers to make it more secure. For instance, a good
example of a historically recommended style of password is T1a5c0p.
Although this might seem like garbage at first glance, you can remember it
easily by thinking of the phrase This Is A Good Choice Of Password,
shortened to Tiagcop, and substituting some of the letters with similar-
looking numbers.
There are some reasons this might not be the best recommendation
anymore because computer systems are much faster than they used to be. It
is a true statement that the longer a password is, the harder it is to break.
For this reason, the newest recommendation is to use a passphrase
consisting of at least four words, perhaps something like green monkeys
chortle often. There is no doubt that a password the length of four common
words combined together would be harder to break than the T1a5c0p
example. From that perspective, it seems like a no-brainer. On the other
hand, a longer password that does not use any words found in a dictionary
would be even better, but the problem here is that these passwords, and
even the T1a5c0p example, can be hard to remember and may end up
being written down on a sticky note next to the computer, perhaps even
stuck to the monitor. That is worse, especially if you use good security and
create a different password for every website and computer system that
requires one.
One solution is to choose a really good password for your system, one that
you will remember, like the four-word example or a long passphrase like