General getting started

[James Good]

Maybe you mean"esc" when you see "spinner" on 1st boot
But now, it's installed, all that setup is for 1st boot only, if you could bypass login it would not be secure
So, I'm guessing that you are trying to boot emmc, do you have a bootable SD?
boot SD, mount emmc 2nd partition, edit /mountpoint/etc/shadow (as root/sudo)
I'm also guessing that you don't remember passwords, not a character mapping issue

Yes, I have a bootable SD and that is how I have been trying to log in.  I have been wanting to make sure the OS was not going to 'act up' before taking the SD card out.