I'm all but certain I got the /dev mount line right, but I won't know until I can get to my research machine again for another..nearly 18 hours.

You'd of course be right about /etc/passed and /etc/shadow, I almost never deal with user accounts and thus confused what I was looking at.  Good catch. 

I'm glad I got it working on my thinkpad though, that at least dispels my theory it was somehow tmpfs related.  I MUST have done something wrong in my setup on the big machine...

Thanks for the replies

On Apr 21, 2016 10:59 PM, "Alan Mizrahi" <alan+crux@mizrahi.com.ve> wrote:
On 2016-04-22 08:31, Steve Volumetric wrote:
I apologize if this is the wrong place for this, but I'm trying to understand an issue I'm running into.

For educational purposes, I'm trying to install Crux 3.2 onto a ramdisk, naturally I know everything will disappear upon reboot, but I'm not worried about that - i'm just trying to see what can be done.

Going from the Official Crux 3.2 install guide, I go through all the same steps I generally follow, except to establish /mnt I do:

mount -t tmpfs -o size=8gb tmpfs /mnt

I can run the setup, I can setup-chroot, but I can't passwd

when I do passwd, it immediately tells me:

Changing password for root
Enter the new password (minimum of 5 characters)
Please use a combination of upper and lower case letters and numbers.
Bad password: too short.
Warning: weak password (enter it again to use it anyway)
passwd: password changed.


but I don't even have a chance to type anything, it just does all of that at once.

You probably skipped this command from the install guide:

mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev


When I look in /etc/passwd  I can see a line for root, but no password, unsurprisingly.


Unsurprising indeed, since the password should be in /etc/shadow ;)


Regards,

Alan