So, when using the official fedora arm images on your raspberry pi (or any other arm board) board you might have faced the problem that it is not easy to use them for a headless (i.e. no keyboard and display connected) machine. There is no default password, fedora asks you to set one on the first boot instead. Which is from a security point of view surely better than shipping with a fixed password. But for headless machines it is quite inconvenient ...

Luckily there is an easy way out. You can use libguestfs-tools. The tools have been created to configure virtual machine images (this is where the name comes from). But the tools work fine with sdcards too.

I'm using a usb sdcard reader which shows up as /dev/sdc on my system. I can just pass /dev/sdc as image to the tools (take care, the device is probably something else for you). For example, to set a root password:

virt-customize -a /dev/sdc --root-password "password:"

The initial setup on the first boot is a systemd service, and it can be turned off by simply removing the symlinks which enable the service:

virt-customize -a /dev/sdc \
  --delete /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/initial-setup.service \
  --delete /etc/systemd/system/graphical.target.wants/initial-setup.service

You can use virt-copy-in (or virt-tar-in) to copy config files to the disk image. Small (or empty) configuration files can also be created with the write command:

virt-customize -a /dev/sdc --write "/.autorelabel:"

Adding the .autorelabel file will force selinux relabeling on the first boot (takes a while). It is a good idea to do that in case you copy files to the sdcard, to make sure the new files are labeled correctly. Especially in case you copy security sensitive things like ssh keys or ssh config files. Without relabeling selinux will not allow sshd access those files, which in turn can break remote logins.

There is alot more the virt-* tools can do for you. Check out the manual pages for more info. And you can easily script things, virt-customize has a --commands-from-file switch which accepts a file with a list of commands.