I've been a bit under the pump lately, so apologies that it's taken me so long to circle back to you.

Firstly, I would recommend installing the ISO to a new VM, rather than using the older OVA. You'll need to configure a new VM first. You'll need a minimum of ~10GB root volume, 512MB RAM and 1 vCPU; although I'd recommend 20+GB root volume, 2GB RAM and 2 (or more) vCPUs if you can spare the resources. Many of our appliances should run fine with the minimum, but most will run better with more resources and there are a few that will almost certainly require more than that (i.e. more than my recommendation above). So you're mileage my vary.

Regardless though, even the older OVA build should "just work"!? Could you please share which particular appliance you were testing and what interface you were trying to log in with?

FYI, on each appliance page (where the download links are) if you scroll down, you should see info about how to log in to each interface.

E.g. on all self hosted appliances SSH/terminal log in uses the 'root' Linux user and password set at first boot. Webshell (shell via web browser on port 12320) and Webmin (web based admin UI) also use the 'root' user and password.

Appliances that include "end user" software (i.e. not dev stacks and frameworks) are usually 'admin', but some appliances have different user names (e.g. the Gitea appliance uses the 'gitea' user). A few use the email address set at first boot. But like I say, each page should spell that out.

If you continue to have issues, then the first thing to consider is the keyboard you are using. By default all of our appliances expect a US-International keyboard. If you are using some other keyboard, then my guess is that the keypresses you entered when setting it up were incorrectly interpreted by TurnKey. But when you try to log in via your web browser (or other native client) they will be interpreted properly - thus won't match.

Our Confconsole CLI tool has a script to change keyboard (and language) - have a look at Advanced >> Region config. having said that, I don't have any other keyboards, so I'm not sure how well it will work (from time to time people who do provide feedback and we update when we get info, but it's not perfect...).

With regards to sending email, whilst we pre-configure all our servers to be able to send mail directly, with all the spammers about these days, most email hosts will silently drop emails from "unknown" sources. We generally recommend configuring the server to use an SMTP relay to send mail. Again we have a Confconsole plugin for that; Advanced >> Mail relay.

If you continue to have issues, please post back with more info about which specific appliance you are using and where/how you're trying to log in.

If your password continues to not work, please try a simple password consisting of just upper case, lower case and numbers. There have been a few cases where the particular software has a problem with a specific character. The characters most likely to cause issues are "special characters" (e.g. punctuation) so if you set a 10-12 char password of just upper, lower case and numbers, if it's going to work, that will do it. If you can confirm that a specific character doesn't work, please do let me know so I can blacklist it for that appliance.