[fedora-arm] initial setting of root password is not working

[Andrew Wing]

Hi Guys,

I recently got Fedora at 22 running on my ARM OEM Board ( TI AM3352 OMAP
family SoC).

As there is no micro-SD socket on the board itself, I followed the
installation instructions from here
*https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/F22/Installation
<https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/F22/Installation>* except
that after I had xzcat'd the minimal image to an SD card (on the host!). I
then blatted the whole thing out again via dd onto the board's emmc memory.
Then rebooting the board into u-boot, I used the following commands (thanks
Peter Robinsom at list) to boot into linux.

setenv bootargs console=${console} root=LABEL=_/ ro rootwait
ext4load mmc 0:1 0x80300000 vmlinuz-4.0.4-301.fc22.armv7hl
ext4load mmc 0:1 0x81600000 uInitrd-4.0.4-301.fc22.armv7hl
ext4load mmc 0:1 0x89300000 my-device-tree.dtb
bootz 0x80300000 0x81600000 0x89300000

Great stuff! Everything boots up, welcome to F22 etc. Then the initial set
up (text) runs and I set a root and user password. After this has seemingly
all worked fine, I'm asked to use my new credentials to log in. The
password I've just created is then roundly rejected as an invalid login!

My first thought was that I should have used rw rather than ro in my
bootargs, so I repeated and had exactly the same result.

I then thought that on the host machine I could just write to /etc/shadow
on the root file system __ on the SD card image. For the root password I
generated an MD5  checksum string and put that in as the root password.
This worked fine on Ubuntu when I tried something similar as an experiment
- a new user effectively had 'password' as a password.  In this context, I
hoped the same approach would in effect pre-load the root password when the
whole image was dd'ed out to the emmc. Consequently I could avoid setting
 any password in initial set-up - no luck, exactly the same result!!

The initial setup is being used in a slightly unusual context - not booting
from sd card but from the onboard emmc so that may be a problem.
Unfortunately I can't effectively debug what's going wrong here because I
can't get in without a root password.

I can break into single user mode but that doesn't give me root user
privilege.

This is very frustrating as I don't even want a root password whilst in
development and I'm sure there's some idiotic obvious thing I'm missing to
set the root password. Any thoughts ?!

Thanks in advance.

Andrew
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/arm/attachments/20150701/ee374661/attachment.html>