[bobones]

That would explain it I suppose, but what I don't understand is how some people supposedly are able to login. I think I'll take a close look at the build (when I get my Ubuntu partition working again).

No, that doesn't explain it, because people with the problem actually get a login prompt from sshd so sshd is running despite what the Unix professional says. The problem seems to be related to detection of the mkpasswd function on some build platforms meaning that the /etc/shadow file containing the encrypted password for "letmein" was not created properly when built on these platforms.

Before I had to delete my Ubuntu partition last night I tried to build a new MX Linux with XBMC. One of the issues I had was that mkpasswd was not present on my machine ("apt-get install whois" fixed that). So there is light at the end of the tunnel.

I had a problem building it because sed does not have the "-c" or "--copy" option on my platform (Ubuntu) that seems to be available on RH based platforms. I had to manually fix a couple of make files to get the build to complete. No such problem with mkpasswd though. I think the issue was that the build previously did not detect that the mkpasswd command was missing so forged ahead, making a bad shadow file.