Basics - BeagleBone - page 46

Discussion
The Bone comes with a nice web-based IDE called Cloud9 . You can learn all about it at the
Cloud9 website , although it's easy enough to use that you can just dive in and begin using
it.
WARNING
By default, the Bone's operating system runs the Cloud9 IDE as the root user. In Linux, this
is a special account that has privileges to perform many operations often excluded to normal
user accounts. These operations include accessing various hardware features and contents of
various files, along with the ability to modify the on-board flash contents. This was done to
make many tasks simpler to complete, but caution should be used before editing system files
you don't understand. The good news is that you can always read Recipe 1.13 to learn how to
restore the onboard flash to the factory contents.
You can find out more about the root account on the Linux Documentation Project System
Administrator's guide's entry on accounts and Debian's wiki entry on the root user .