Almalinux 9 headless login on Raspberry Pi 4

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1

I have imaged a microSD with AlmaLinux 9 from:
https://repo.almalinux.org/rpi/9/images/AlmaLinux-9-RaspberryPi-latest.aarch64.raw.xz

I have booted the image on my Raspberry Pi 4 8G and it accepts username “root” but not the default passworld “almalinux”.

Is there another password or do I have an SSH issue possibly?

Thanks,
Brian Hendrix

2

yeah i found this a bit weird.

the problem is there is no other user than root, and as root ssh with a password is disabled (in fact ssh is disabled) you can only login via the serial console or hdmi+keyboard. almalinux is the root password though. not very useful for headless.

i worked around it by injecting a root ssh key into the sdcard’s /root/.ssh/authorized_keys, but you have to do it on a machine that understands selinux (don’t mount it on a debian box like i did!) or create /.autorelabel on the ext4 partition of the sdcard and an empty /boot/ssh on the vfat partition file to enable ssh.

seems sub-optimal to me. really needs to be a non-root user who can ssh and use sudo and have ssh enabled by default, but the rpi foundation found that too many new users were getting pwned.