My first guess was that perhaps the DB has changed, but looking at the inithook code (this bit particularly) I can see that it currently uses a hash for the password. They're not very secure, so my guess is that they've switched to something better (bcrypt is all the rage these days). I'm not sure if that's it though, you'll need to try to diagnose the issue. IME if you look in the database (before the inithook has been run) if the password hash starts with a "$2" that usually means it's bcrypt.

If that's the case then you're in luck as I recently fixed the Concrete5 inithook as they changed from some esoteric messy salted hash to bcrypt which might give you a hand? Have a look at this commit diff for Concrete5 to get some pointers...

Also as it turns out; this could be timely... We are gearing up for v14.1 and although historically we only installed security patches for maintenance updates, we are considering including some other software updates. So if you can get this working, please open a new issue on the tracker. Don't worry about tagging it (you can't anyway), I'll see it and update it). Also do a pull request against the SuiteCRM appliance code; it also helps if you can add a comment like "closes https://github.com/turnkeylinux/tracker/issues/XXX" - where XXX is the issue number.

I'm fairly certain that there is more to this than I originally thought and that the current install process is not compatible with the newer version. As you saw on GitHub we'll have a look into and see how we go...