Yup -- sorry, the $ is usually what you'll see at the end of your prompt, so I threw it in there to indicate that you should type it at the terminal.
For example, here at work my terminal looks like this:
Code:
ledbettj@corgan:~/ $ <what I type goes here>
which means that I'm logged in as ledbettj on the machine 'corgan' in my home directory.
The # symbol is what you'll usually see at the end of the prompt when you log in as root:
Code:
root@corgan:/home/ledbettj/ # <what I type goes here>
The really don't mean anything, it just separates the command prompt from whatever it is that you type after it :)
Also, if you want to change to a non-root user, there should be users/groups menu somewhere where you can create a new user account and assign it permissions. On my system (which is not Fedora), it's under System->Administration->Users and Groups.