Initial setup may leave system with a locked oem account, with no way out

[anaran]

See http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/os-applications/f/4613/p/19630951/20762642#20762642

[advancingu]

Could you please add the steps to reproduce here?

[anaran]

Well, how do you reproduce a bad first impression :-)

How my system got into this state I don't know, but I guess it could be simulated by locking the only user account with
passwd --lock user
and then to try to perform any admin tasks like software install or adding more users or creating a dell recovery image.

Let me repeat my forum report from techcenter post here as well:

Looks like the initial setup process is not robust enough to cope with some real-world issues.

In my case it might have been initial problems to connect to my wlan router.

After that I was left with automatically booting into a locked oem account I had no control over.

That did not even allow me to cut a dell recovery media.

[LiohMoeller]

From my experience this may only occur if one selects to create a recovery media during installation. I guess this is a known bug and hard to fix afterwards (for deviced already shipped). For future production, it might of course be great to have a working base install.

The good thing is that this option is not selected by default, so the chance is good that not so many users will hit it.

[anaran]

@MarcusMoeller I have not chosen to create recovery media.
The only issue I can see is that wifi did not connect on my first installation attempt.
I find it only mildly comforting that not everybody might be hit by this issue.
They way I see it: if the problem does not get fixes then Dell will pay with increased support load and reputation.