Debian nocloud images on UTM/QEMU

The nocloud flavor of Debian cloud images used to be the most straightforward way to boot a working Debian installation. You cloud simply create a VM using one of these images, boot it, and log in as root with no password. Everything would work out of the box. Unfortunately, the developers decided that we can’t have nice things and made the process way more complicated than it ever needed to be. If your VM does not display console output before the login prompt, like UTM/QEMU does by default, the boot process appears to hang, leaving you with a non-working system.

There is a way to restore the previous behavior, although slightly more complicated than it used to be:

• Boot the VM and, in the GRUB menu, press e.
• Find the line starting with linux, append console=tty0, and press CTRL+X.
• When systemd-firstboot greets you, press any key and skip the timezone question by pressing ENTER again.
• Set a secure root password, like hunter2, and confirm it.
• Log in as root using the password you just set, then remove it with passwd -d root.

After that, you will once again be able to log in as root without a password.