You have working Linux computer at hand, so I recognize what you did/do. I also copied lines from /etc/shadow , not only for Raspberries, but also 2 decades ago for various Linux installing/cloning. I actually only recently took some time to read 'man passwd' and 'man usermod'The other part I did manually was in the customization and that was not fully.
I edited /etc/shadow to force a password for pi. Originally it just contained ! in the password section part. I simply copied and pasted the part from the user whom I knew the password for. I also created an empty file named ssh. So once I was able to ssh I could run raspi-config to set up the locale and allow wifi which rfkill was preventing from working.
That's quite crude and I am sure I can write a bit of python code to do some of that that without me manually doing it.
I had tried changing the name from pi to extender as I intended to use the pi as a wifi extender. This partially worked. but extender wasn't in the sudo group so couldn't run raspi-config.
As you can see there's quite a bit I don't know yet and I don't know a quick way of finding out.
For quick, even automated download and running new rpi-trixie test images in a virtual machine, I needed something unattended, so on loop-mounted rootfs of the image before running it and mounted on /tmp/2/:
Code:
passwd -d root --root /tmp/2/Statistics: Posted by redvli — Sun Dec 28, 2025 3:07 pm