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

[Scott M. Jones]

Can you mount the root filesystem on another Linux system somewhere and
edit /etc/passwd?  If so, remove the 'x' in the root line so it just
starts with root:: and then you can log in as root with no password when
you boot up F22.  Then use 'passwd' to set it to something else once you
log in.

You should boot as 'ro' and the kernel will remount as 'rw' at the right
time.

-Scott


On 7/1/15 5:14 PM, Andrew Wing wrote:
> 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/
> 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